Heinz Streib

Heinz Streib is Senior Professor at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. There he has established the Research Center for Biographical Studies in Contemporary Religion. He received his Ph.D. from Emory University in 1989, Atlanta with a thesis on Hermeneutics of Metaphor, Symbol and Narrative in Faith Development Theory (Frankfurt: Peter Lang ,1991) and in 1995 he completed his Habilitation at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universtät, Frankfurt/Main with a thesis on Entzauberung der Okkultfaszination (Kampen: Kok, 1996). He had teaching positions: 1995-1996 at University of Bayreuth for religious socialization, and 1995-2019 for religious education at Bielefeld University, where he is now senior professor for research focusing on psychology of religion. Since 2016, he is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, after (2008 - 2016) he was Editor of the Archive for the Psychology of Religion. His books include Deconversion. Qualitative and Quantitative Results from Cross-Cultural Research in Germany and the United States of America (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht 2009), Semantics and Psychology of Spirituality. A Cross-cultural Analysis (Springer 2016), and Xenosophia and Religion: Biographical and Statistical Paths for a Culture of Welcome (Springer 2018. His research interests focus on biographical-reconstructive and psychometric assessment of deconversion, fundamentalism, xenophobia and the semantics of “spirituality.”