Academic literature on the topic 'Psychology and Christianity'

THE INTEGRATION OF PSYCHOLOGY & CHRISTIANITY: A Domain-Based Approach by William L. Hathaway and Mark A. Yarhouse. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press Academic, 2021. 199 pages. ISBN: 9780830841837. *Reading The Integration of Psychology and Christianity brought to mind the lively discussions about integration that I had with my fellow undergraduates at Gordon College some twenty years ago. We were hampered in reaching any agreement by the fact that our assigned text, Psychology and Christianity: Four Views,1 presented four authors who each defined integration in their own idiosyncratic way, which then resulted in us students talking past each other. *If only we'd had this book! Hathaway and Yarhouse resolve these confusions by offering a "domain-based approach." Rather than advocating for a particular integration approach, as has been common in integration scholarship, Hathaway and Yarhouse outline the multiplicity of ways in which the Christian psychologist might choose to integrate faith and psychology. This approach is one I found immediately useful, given my position as chair of psychology at a small Christian liberal arts college where I frequently mentor junior colleagues with less experience in Christian higher education as they learn to integrate faith into their teaching. Hathaway and Yarhouse's categories include the following: worldview integration, theoretical integration, applied integration, role integration, and personal integration. These categories not only offer a shared vocabulary for integration conversations, but they can serve as an inventory of one's comfort level in different types of integration (one may be quite comfortable doing personal integration while finding theoretical integration challenging, for example). Overall, the book is excellent as a catalyst for personal reflection and growth for the Christian psychologist, whether they be researcher, professor, or clinician. *A particular strength of the book is its emphasis on clinical and applied psychological work. The most original contributions are the chapters on applied integration and role integration. The former adapts a secular model for a Christian population or develops Christian interventions from Christian thought and practice while the later describes living out the role expectations of a particular vocation (e.g., counselor) in a way that is consistent with Christian identity. These chapters have many examples from Yarhouse and Hathaway's own experience in navigating these areas. Their clear articulation of the professional duties of the Christian who joins the counseling guild, for example, was extremely useful. I found myself grateful to have their take on role integration to offer to my aspiring therapist students, who often find themselves torn between personal conviction and professional obligations. Yarhouse and Hathaway offer a well-argued Christian perspective that emphasizes the priority of those professional obligations. *A few criticisms. I mentioned that this book reminded me of my integration discussions in the early 2000s. While the integration resources are helpfully updated and the whole book is very well resourced, I found that the core approach to integration had remained largely unchanged. That is to say, this is very much a book written by two fairly conservative white American evangelical men. While the authors are moderates in evangelical terms, Yarhouse's scholarship (in sexual and gender identity) brings him into American culture-wars territory. It is not surprising, then, that they would see the challenges of Christian psychologists to be primarily in dealing with an often-antagonistic secular psychology. To be clear, far from advocating a hostile approach to secular psychology in return, they model a subtle Christian attempt to influence psychology policies to be more compatible with Christian values--and indeed their personal examples of successfully doing this are laudably sensible. *However, the revelations of evangelical complicity during the Trump years and the current rise of American Christian nationalism have left me questioning whether the largely apolitical nature of my Christian training in psychology was sufficiently transformational. I find myself yearning for a post-Trump integration analysis, an approach that grapples with the harms of evangelicals' quest for power. Or to put it another way, I question the idea, as sometimes implied by the authors, that the primary challenge Christians working in psychology face is the problem of too little cultural power. *The book's most obvious limitations in this vein are in the worldview integration chapter. Here we find the conservative nonprofit Heterodox Academy and its idea of "viewpoint diversity" uncritically embraced. The suggestion is that the conservative/Christian worldview should be considered a type of diversity akin to racial or gender diversity, given its minority status in liberal-dominated psychology. Given the very real challenges presented by racism and sexism, this framing seems at best tone deaf and at worst an encouragement to evangelicals to approach psychology with a persecution mindset. Also missing from this picture is the fact that the discipline often aligns itself with powerful interests and is therefore much less concerned with political beliefs per se than with power (to give just one example, the 2015 Hoffman Report documented how, during the Bush era, the American Psychological Association colluded with the US Department of Defence to change the APA ethics code to allow psychologists to participate in "enhanced interrogations" of terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay). Perhaps Christian integration efforts might involve an Imago Dei-informed attempt to challenge this status quo. My own graduate training in critical/feminist psychology prompted me to reflect on the harms that even well-meaning psychologists might perpetrate if they allow themselves to be used to enable the capitalist control of people. From Amazon warehouses to counseling practices, our neoliberal world offers many ways in which unwary Christian psychologists can contribute to the dehumanization of people. Counselors teach their clients to understand their mental struggles as caused by individual failings while ignoring the influence of systemic factors; this should be at least as much an ethical concern for Christian psychologists as the more typical hot-button trio of abortion, LGBTQ+, and euthanasia (Hathaway and Yarhouse tend to highlight these three in their examples). *Tellingly, in this book, the topic of social justice is relegated to the personal integration chapter as something that psychologists might choose to embrace as part of their individualistic spiritual development. Missing is the idea that justice or advocacy for the powerless might inform psychological theory from the get-go or even form a core part of the Christian worldview. In fact, the term "worldview" itself can be read as a sign of the static, inward-looking nature of the framing chosen here. Much as James Sire's books on the topic are classics, the fact remains that the term worldview is a distinctively evangelical Christian idea, out of touch with secular psychology. Further, the take on postmodernism that the worldview approach encourages verges on caricature. Although the authors of this book acknowledge some of these weaknesses, their choices in this chapter betray a lack of conversation with postmodern theorists in psychology, whose focus is not generally moral relativism but a critique of dominant power structures. Citing such scholars, many of whom make relevant critiques of psychology's philosophical blind spots, would have strengthened the worldview chapter. *One particularly clarifying move this book makes is to put integration typologies on a continuum with three major categories: assimilation, productive tension, and expanded horizons. The ideal integration work, they argue (riffing on Gadamer), results in an expanded horizon, where the insights of both sides are modified by fusion with the other. This idea is one that they might have taken further. Hathaway and Yarhouse are careful to articulate the privileged nature of scripture in such an encounter of horizons, but this seems to underestimate the cultural knowledge and assumptions that we import into scriptural interpretation. Surely the encounter of horizons is not pure divine revelation meeting pure psychological knowledge, but rather, the encounter is mediated by biased and finite human beings. The authors define worldview integration as "an attempt to reposition psychology within a cognitive frame that is coherently embedded within Christian thought and premised on Christian assumptions." I wish they had been more reflective about whose Christian thought and Christian assumptions they were presenting as normative. Given that this book is published by IVP Academic, this will likely not be a problem for their target audience, who probably share their assumptions. But I would expect a book that champions the expanded horizon as the telos of integration to be more influenced by a diversity of Christian voices and a diversity of psychological approaches. *Perhaps this is more a complaint about psychology integration work as a whole, rather than this book in particular. Overall, I am very appreciative of this contribution, and simply hope that the foundation laid here can be used by readers to build integration efforts that are more self-reflective and outward-looking integration efforts than the book itself models. Hathaway and Yarhouse's main contributions in this book are (1) a comprehensive and sophisticated review of past integration work, (2) the helpful clarifying domain categories, and (3) innovations in the areas of applied integration and role integration, areas that previous integration work has neglected. For those hoping to get up to speed on integration work in psychology or hoping to grow in the sophistication of their integration efforts, this is a valuable resource and very much worth reading. *Note *1Eric L. Johnson and Stanton L. Jones, eds., Psychology and Christianity: Four Views (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000). *Reviewed by Elissa Rodkey, Associate Professor of Psychology, Crandall University, Moncton, NB E1C 9L7.

This article is written from the perspective of both professor and student, detailing the development of a system of psychology as a part of senior seminar. After briefly introducing professor and student, we each tell about the purpose of the project, the preparation for writing the system, the process of developing it, and the product—a system of psychology.

AbstractThis paper describes and compares two imageries for “peace” found in contemporary North America. Both arise within a context of “expressive individualism” as depicted by Bellah et al. and both attempt to ground values beyond subjective preferences. Popular psychology, especially represented by Maslow and self-help writings, relies primarily on the image of organic growth for a vision of peace and fulfillment. Language of unresolvable conflict and warfare is entirely avoided. In contrast, Charismatic Christianity, although it too employs the language of “health” and “growth” also advocates an imagery of peace focused on the triumphant Christ enthroned in heaven, after his defeat of spiritual enemies. The author suggests that the vigorous use of this language is best understood as a corrective and supplement to the “growth” themes more fully congruent with expressive individualism.

My thesis brings into conversation, Buddhist spiritual teachings with the medieval contemplative Christian understanding and modern ontological thoughts, to investigate the dynamic characteristics of spiritual transformation. The thesis explores the following questions: Is there a spiritual journey? To what extent the journey itself is the transforming energy? To whom is transformation happening? How do we become the truth uncovered? Have we always been living in a ‘plenum’ with respect to the Buddha nature teaching? Is the Buddha and his teachings revolutionary agents of continuous transformation. Does the spiritual path focus on the cultivation of a Nirvanic-mind only, what about the body? My conversations revealed the following: That it is possible to become aware that conditioned thoughts are thinking the person. That it is possible for the conditioned (klesha) mind to become aware of its own Nirvanic mind-nature. A deluded mind uncovers its own wisdom nature by practising an unconstructed knowing. Thus, the enlightened mind perfects ‘objectless awareness’ and encounters reality as wisdom itself. The transformative power of failure is a yoga and as such it is perfected in the Bodhisattva vow to save all beings. Central to sustaining the spiritual path is to have a question such as ‘Is what I am doing what God is doing’. Life and the spiritual path are unpredictable; the unpredictable challenges the mind’s tendencies to conceptualize experience. The body holds the unpredictable energy of the disowned, which relates to as ‘flashing’ energies in the body. Transformation is the recognition of the first pure moment of awareness which also recognizes that goodness is at the heart of all things. The liberating doctrine is that everything is open (empty) and unbounded thus all matter is redemptive and as such we are always in the realm of truth.

AbstractBoth theoretical reflection and empirical research have purported a mutual exchange of benefits for the collaboration between positive psychology (PP) and Christianity. However, the varied belief systems and worldviews held among adherents of distinct Christian traditions may interfere with practical collaborative efforts between PP and Christianity. In this chapter, we explore important considerations for effective collaboration between PP and Christianity. Namely, we argue that Christianity can provide a framework for what individuals should value and what virtues a person should pursue, whereas PP can provide the tools and methodology for how to pursue the goals that are identified by Christianity. We first review the geographic distribution and demographic composition of Christians around the world, emphasizing the value of context when working with Christian populations. Second, we highlight fundamental beliefs and values that may influence how Christians interpret and utilize empirical findings from the field of PP. Third, we discuss how Christian beliefs, traditions, and doctrines influence our understandings of well-being, health, and virtue development. Throughout the chapter, we discuss strategies and implications for positive collaboration between the fields of PP and Christianity.