Another “intersection of personality and spirituality” book is What Is Your Church’s Personality?, by Philip Douglass. http://www.amazon.com/What-Your-Churchs-Personality-Discovering/dp/1596380225 (I’ve read it but not reviewed it.)

whew! sorry about being so tangential, but one of your opening sentences, “At the risk of hyperbole, this one book has given me tools to rethink numerous passages in my troubled relationship with institutional religion.” got me to thinking that you might appreciate these other books as well. :-}

what if extroversion is largely socially constructed …. And so is introversion a social construction

I tend to think of introversion and extroversion as natural tendencies which, as all other personality tendencies, are somewhat of a balancing act. Noel’s “depends on the activity” (or lack thereof) strikes a chord. Neither is problematic in and of itself unless taken to extremes, in which case both can become narcissistic pathologies. As for “inner wounds inflicted by the noisy world outside” us, I’m slowly learning to master the art of simply not allowing it. Though I suspect the concept of “free will” doesn’t hold water, consciousness includes a center of being the Hindus call Anahata (“unstruck”, “unhurt” or “unbeaten”) and, as the sayings go, “home is where the heart is” and “home is anywhere you are”.

In one of Hanh’s dharma talks, which was included in the Peace Is Every Step documentary, one will find this:

A human being is like a television set with millions of channels. If we turn the Buddha (or the Christ) on, we are the Buddha (or the Christ). If we turn a smile on, we really are the smile. We cannot let just one channel dominate us. We have the seed of everything in us, and we have to seize the situation in our hand, to recover our own sovereignty. When we sit down peacefully, breathing and smiling, with awareness, we are our true selves, we have sovereignty over ourselves. When we open ourselves up to a TV program, we let ourselves be invaded by the program. Sometimes it is a good program, but often it is just noisy. Because we want to have something other than ourselves enter us, we sit there and let a noisy television invade us, assail us, destroy us. Even if our nervous system suffers, we don’t have the courage to stand up and turn it off, because if we do that, we will have to return to our self.

There’s no question in my mind that our culture encourages (and rewards) extroversion. Extroversion is, after all, associated with gregariousness (and who doesn’t like “friendly”?) while introversion is associated with narcississm and self-involvement by the dictionary. I don’t think the emphasis on extroversion is a direct result of “Christianity in particular encouraging more noise than silence” as much it is the superficiality of our primarily consumerist society. I was honestly beginning to think that would never change, but the tremendous upsurge of interest in spirituality, “mysticism”, contemplation and community is, among other things, an indication to me that we are slowly awakening from the “spell”, taking stock of the truly precious, and beginning to tap into our inherent potential.

to a great extent, we equate “social” with “extroverted” in our culture.

Oh. I thought that was ‘entirely’. “You should be more outgoing.” “You should talk more.” “You should be”… pretty much anything other than you are or desire to be. One wonders how many “introverts” have felt a little snicker welling up when the hymnal was turned to “Just as I am”.

Perhaps more importantly, though, introversion is also associated with “fearful”, “untrustworthy”, “calculating”, and/or the more baffling “possessing no social skills”, which actually translates as “gullible”. How Freudian, but that’s finally the point. We actually live in a culture in which pretty much everyone is either knowingly or unknowingly an amateur psychologist thanks primarily to its predominantly analytical character but, while introversion may not equal introspection, it is an important prerequisite for traversing what Stephen King once termed “corridors lined with mirrors where people seldom look”, an important task historically overlooked by the establishment of all our many “disciplines”, though that appears to be rapidly changing.

his ecclesial vision calls for creative partnership between extroverts and introverts

It’s about time.