R.A. Vroom (Richard) MA

My expertise lies in exploring the connection between personality and religious or spiritual experiences. Many people describe moments they see as deeply significant, transformative, or encounters with God. These experiences are collected in the Alister Hardy Database, which contains hundreds of personal testimonies. I study these accounts to understand both what people experienced and how their way of describing it reflects their personality.

To do this, I build on Carl Jung’s ideas about personality types, later developed into four familiar dimensions: Extraversion or Introversion, Sensing or Intuition, Thinking or Feeling, and Judging or Perceiving. Instead of relying only on surveys or statistics, I focus on the language of the testimonies themselves. I ask: does the writer attend more to facts or to possibilities, to logic or to values, to planning or to openness? This allows me to combine close reading of individual accounts with wider patterns across many stories.

By linking personality with religious experience, my work contributes to a deeper understanding of human spirituality. It also offers practical insights for fields such as pastoral care, where greater awareness of personality differences can help support people in their search for meaning.

Supervisors: dr. C.J.A. Sterkens en dr. J. Copier