Ignoring the good life
Psychology has become so focused on mental illness, says Martin Seligman, that it ignores human choice, will, character, and responsibility; forgets to work at making happy, productive, meaningful lives happier, more productive, and more meaningful; and focuses interventions only on reducing misery and not on increasing happiness.Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association, advocates for "positive psychology," a new focus in the field on the strengths, abilities, and resiliency of people.
Positive psychology as a movement seems to offer much to the field of pastoral theology.
For example, I've long considered "abundant life" the goal of my clinical work--but Seligman suggests we've ignored abundance to focus on deficit, which keeps us from understanding more about what does lead to "abundant life" in a psychological sense.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, March 30, 2004
James: public grieving, "private" grief
James Kearney died today. I didn't know him. He was a playwright, a Columbia grad, an uncle, and--apparently--a pretty good friend to those who knew him.The "blogosphere" is rapidly posting reflections on his brief life (he was 27 when he died) and how it is impacting those who knew him: see, for example, Unwelcome, Friends, He Died Today. Take a look at the comments, too.
Having written recently about spirituality and grief, I'm alert to new manifestations of grief--especially those shaped by emerging/popular culture. And James' death offers some insight into ways that today's technologically savvy folk are coping with loss.
The Internet allows those who choose to express "private" grief in fairly public ways--complete with photos, trackback links, and comments.
This is not the political grieving of the early to mid years of the AIDS pandemic, in which candlelight vigils and quilt displays became vehicles for public consciousness, education, and increased funding for medicine and research. This is not public grief related to the death of a public figure like Princess Diana, John Kennedy, or John Lennon.
This is private folk expressing their losses, and making meaning of them, in the midst of a vast, interconnected community.
The remembrances are pretty intimate, and it feels voyeuristic to look at the photos, read the depth of loss, and then see a later reflection on how "illegitimate" some of his friends feel their experiences of/reflections on death must be.
But it's pretty poignant stuff. I didn't even know him, and I'm sad James is gone. And there's a whole new community of folk who will be in my prayers today.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Sunday, March 28, 2004
Poetry over propositions
Scott Holland reviews Richard Rorty's philosophy in Cross Currents..: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Thursday, March 25, 2004
Resilience and the discipline of introspection
Psychologists can help clients build resilience by teaching them to monitor their perceptions and reactions to events, and change them when necessary, the American Psychological Association reports in its online Monitor on Psychology."Helping the individual with personality disorder to develop cognitive, behavioral, social and emotional competencies will assist them to manage day-to-day stressors and events effectively," Mark Reinecke, PhD, reports in the current issue. [He's an associate psychology professor and chief of the division of psychology at Northwestern University.]
Other researchers says practitioners should "imbue those with personality disorders with the habit of trying new approaches when old ones are not working. For example, a therapist might work with a client to brainstorm new ways to meet friends if previous attempts have been rebuffed."
What these researchers are describing sounds an awful lot like the 2nd and 3rd century Christian practice of introspection and the Buddhist practice of mindfulness. Both approaches teach individuals to be aware of--and relate differently to--the thoughts and passions that stir them up.
For an introduction to introspection as a spiritual discipline, see my book Short-Term Spiritual Guidance and Roberta Bondi's To Love as God Loves.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Thursday, March 25, 2004
Serotonin and spirituality
Researchers curious about the link between depression, anxiety, and the brain's serotonin system have posited a relationship between low serotonin and spirituality, reports Science and Theology News.A strong linear correlation exists, the Swedish scientists report, between high scores for openness to spiritual experience and a low density of serotonin receptors.
Still, it's too early to conclude that there's a direction relationship between spirituality and serotonin, Keith Meador, Ph.D., tells the newspaper. [He's director of Duke University's Theology and Medicine program.] Rather, the data must be examined to interpret the relationship between the brain and spiritual experience.
While it's too early to draw many conclusions from this study, it does suggest some questions that pastoral theologians and caregivers might want to engage.
For example, are different spiritual practices indicated for people with different biological levels of openness to religious/spiritual experience? How are experiences of depression, anxiety, and spiritual experience similar? Different? What criteria might we use for distinguishing between them? What is the spiritual impact of using serotonin reuptake inhibitors to treat anxiety, depression, and other mental and biological illnesses?
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Thursday, March 25, 2004
Invisible but not invincible
While I was never more than a lurker, I'm saddened by the news that Invisible Adjunct is leaving both blogging and the academy.A consistently sane voice on what one commentator called "the scam of graduate school," IA has done more than chronicle the woes of the academically underemployed. The blog has also illustrated the quality possible in online community, demonstrating that our cyber connections don't have to be about dating or sex or merchandising ourselves.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Listen
A poem received through serendipity:If you listen,
not to the pages or preachers
but to the smallest flower
growing from a crack
in your heart,
you will hear a great song
moving across a wide ocean
whose water is the music
connecting all the islands
of the universe together,
and touching all
you will feel it
touching you
around you. . .
embracing you
with light.
It's from the artist and poet John Squadra, who wrote This Ecstasy. [The book is on the recommended reading list at Heron Dance, where you'll also find gorgeous art.]
I received the poem today in an e-newsletter from Liz Budd Ellman, executive director of Spiritual Directors International. She followed it with this prayer:
"In the northern hemisphere, we move into increasing light as we approach the sacred Passover and Easter season. In the southern hemisphere, our members move into an increased awareness of diminishing light as the winter months approach. Loving Creator, we ask your blessing on our search for new light among us, wherever we live, and that your light touch us in a new way during this sacred season."
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Monday, March 22, 2004
A genetic knot?
The desire to marry may be influenced in part by a person's genes, researchers report in the current issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.A study of more than 7,000 people suggests that we inherit a propensity to marry and there's a genetic link between personality and a tendency to marry.
So . . . given a recent turn to brain science and biology in pastoral theology--where the argument is made that genetic and biological tendencies are created by God--does this study suggest that God creates some people for marriage and others for singleness?
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Friday, March 19, 2004
The living human web, circa 2004
The web of connections that ties us to each other and to the rest of creation is now a consumer product: social networking.As partial and distorted as it may be to reduce our relationships to a commodity, the perspective is changing the way people look at themselves and each other:
"When you look at the world as a networked world, it's a very different thing," Jonathan Abrams, founder of Friendster, said this month at the SXSW04 interactive conference.
"What Friendster does today is very global. What if it were very personal. . . . What if you could see your global personal rating. How does that change the utility to you -- and how does it affect your ability to screw up? It's the Web of trust concept, but it's also the Web of influence. When you think of your social network as a filter to stem information overload and prevent abuse, a lot of things become possible."
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, March 16, 2004
"Salvation inflation?"
That's how Christianity Today online headlines its interview with political scientist Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and Public Life at Boston College and author of the most recent assessment of the interplay of American faith and popular culture: The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith.Provocatively, Wolfe has written, "in the United States culture has transformed Christ, as well as all other religions found within these shores. In every aspect of the religious life, American faith has met American culture--and American culture has triumphed."
He credits faith--especially evangelical Christianity--with providing empowerment, an ethic of non-judgment, and a strong and positive sense of self confidence to Americans. And, he intimates, those qualities seem to be an outcome of Christianity's interaction with the mythos of the United States.
But at the same time, Wolfe is wary about what he calls "salvation inflation," in which people (regardless of faith background) "confess fewer and fewer sins and are rewarded with more and more."
For a critical assessment of Wolfe's project, see sociologist R. Stephen Warner's review, "They're OK, We're OK: So Much for Being 'Resident Aliens'."
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, March 16, 2004
Ouch
David Lester rants about whiney academics and reveals his strategy for a wonderful scholarly life.I can imagine him as a friend. But who would want him for a colleague?
His recommendation raises a critical question though: What obligation do teachers have to help students learn to negotiate (and become responsible participants in) a high-touch, connected, and wired world?
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Friday, March 12, 2004
Parsing human nature
Evolutionary psychology, despite its reductionist approach to religion, offers provocative approaches to questions about human nature--and it's growing in credibility and popularity among some scholars."What we're after is mapping the properties of universal human nature," explains John Tooby, codirector of the Center of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and coeditor of The Adapted Mind.
Using evolutionary theory as a starting-point, the field seeks to explain human behaviors as adaptive traits for the good of the group or accidental by-products of evolutionary changes.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Thursday, March 11, 2004
Ora et labora, Version 21.2-4
Medieval monks copied manuscripts by hand--so why shouldn't contemporary brothers sell toner and ink-jet cartridges to support themselves and missions around the world?LaserMonks.com, the inspiration of Bernard McCoy of the Cistercian Abbey in Wisconsin, offers deep discounts on printing and imaging supplies through an e-business portal maintained when the community isn't engaged in Gregorian chant.
The profits ($2,000 in 2002, $500,000 in 2003, and an expected $1.5 million in 2004) support the monastery and shelters for the poor, care for abused women and children, and computer training for Vietnamese orphans.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Thursday, March 11, 2004
A pestilent pledge?
Teens who make a onetime pledge to remain virgins until marriage catch sexually transmitted diseases about as often as those who don't pledge abstinence, according to a study of the sex lives of 12,000 adolescents.In addition, the "Just Say No" crowd was less likely to notice symptoms of their infections, making it more likely they would pass disease on to others, say researchers at Columbia University.
Nonetheless, these teens did wait longer to engage in premarital sex--delaying intercourse about 18 months longer than their non-abstinent peers.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Thursday, March 11, 2004
A bang or a whimper?
Modernist assumptions about the fate of the cosmos are perhaps best summed up with T.S. Eliot's immortal lines: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper."Now it seems there's a third possibility, too: not a bang or a whimper, but a crestfallen crumble--sort of like the collapse of a falling cake.
Writing in Slate, Jim Holt explores the fate of the world through the best guesses of contemporary cosmologists in a rambling memo titled "How Will the Universe End?" (Woody Allen fans will especially appreciate his introduction.)
Taking stock of what he's learned, Holt wrote,
"It was time to tally up the eschatological results. The cosmos has three possible fates: Big Crunch (eventual collapse), Big Chill (expansion forever at a steady rate), or Big Crackup (expansion forever at an accelerating rate). Humanity, too, has three possible fates: eternal flourishing, endless stagnation, or ultimate extinction."
Pretty heavy possibilities, any way you look at it.
I have a sense that the fate of the world has become increasingly important to Christians "in the trenches"--not just the ecotheologists, but the ordinary person in the pew. In the parish, I find questions about the personal fate of individual Christians (the doctrine of soteriology) are being matched by questions about the fate of the universe (the doctrine of eschatology).
We in the West, I think, are beginning to grasp that God's redemptive work encompasses all of creation, not just humanity. (Eastern Orthodox theology has always understood this better than we have.)
Yet few pastoral theologians have engaged the doctrine of eschatology--"the last things"--as a component of (let alone as a foundation for) Christian care. But there are signs all around us--the popularity of the "Left Behind" series, the appearance of Holt's recent article, millennial cults, Armageddon politics--that suggest questions about the end times are entering public consciousness in important ways.
I don't know what it would look like to integrate eschatology into our pastoral practices. But until we do so in a reflective way, we may always find ourselves reacting to, rather than adopting a responsive and responsible position toward, public questions about the ultimate ultimate concern.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Practice makes perfect
Sanctification, the process of being transformed toward holiness, remains a central telos (goal) of many Christian traditions.And spiritual disciplines--the ways we practice our faith and perfect our ability to live continuously in the presence of God--have always been a central means of cooperating in God's transformation of our lives.
There's no richer source of information on contemporary spiritual disciplines than the Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith.
Designed to support "people who yearn to live in ways that are attentive to the active presence of God and supportive of the well-being of themselves, others, and the world," the project seeks to "develop resources to help contemporary people live the Christian faith with vitality and integrity in changing times."
Bringing the wisdom of Christian tradition to bear on the ways we live out faith in daily life, the project's website features a dozen or more contemporary spiritual disciplines, a grant program, plus a library of articles and sermons on "practicing our faith."
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Girls and depression
A University of Alberta study suggests that 25 percent of girls aged 16 to 19 will experience an episode of major depression.That figure is nearly twice as high as that for boys of the same age, and--perhaps oddly--smoking seems to increase the risk of depression, a fact that researchers suggest might be related to attempts to self-medicate through tobacco use.
For a more thorough look at depression and females, see Christie Cozad Neuger's seminal text Counseling Women: A Narrative, Pastoral Approach.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Friday, March 05, 2004
Philosopher, heal thyself
Pastoral theology has long engaged psychoanalysis as a cognate discipline that helps make sense of human experience. And systematic theologians have always turned to philosophy to help make sense of God.But there's a growing use of psychoanalytic thought in philosophy, a convergence of the two disciplines that theologians have appropriated most, perhaps, for their own work.
"[I]s there a real connection between the two disciplines," Louise Braddock asks, "or are philosophers with an interest in psychoanalysis just trawling for ideas, critical openings, or catchy titles?"
Writing the The Philosopher's Magazine online, Braddock concludes that psychoanalysis at least gives philosophers a tool with which to figure out the puzzle of human experience.
Reflection at the intersection of these two disciplines might help pastoral theologians clarify questions of (and perhaps develop answers to) epistemology and methodology in their own field of expertise.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Friday, March 05, 2004
Suicide in uniform
Military mental health could be a speciality of its own, given the stresses and contexts in which mere mortals find themselves during war.And there's a nagging question--do such experiences lead soldiers to take their own lives?
"Longer deployments and a controversial war . . . ," reports Boston public radio, "can lead to increased anxiety and depression. But can it also lead to suicide? That's what some families and veteran advocates want to know."
See also this National Public Radio story about the slashing of mental health funding available to the Veterans Administration.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Friday, March 05, 2004
Mapping the mystical union
The Unio Mystica--mystical union with God--has long been a goal of particular forms of Christian piety. Now it's a scientific goal as well.Using Carmelite nuns as subjects, a Canadian brain-imager is seeking to discover what parts of the brain are involved in experiences of mystical union--not, he says, to prove the brain has a "God center," but to map the neurological processes beneath this mystical experience.
"Preliminary data," writes The Economist in a column titled "spiritual neurology," "implicate a network of brain regions in the Unio Mystica, including those associated with emotion processing and the spatial representation of self."
This preliminary data, however, leads to a traditional criticism of the psychology of religion: that experiments are "not really measuring a mystical experience at all—merely an intense emotional one."
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Friday, March 05, 2004
Does crisis counseling help or hurt?
So asks Jerome Groopman in a New Yorker piece focused on the grief work provided after the September 11, 2001, attacks.Challenging some assumptions of the pervasive "critical incident stress debriefing" model, and looking at the causes of post-traumatic stress disorder, Groopman concludes with the idea that perhaps all that is necessary to deal with crises is whatever it is that helps us deal with grief--eat, drink, sleep, participate in community ritual, and talk to others in our social-support network.
In short, "The traumatized person should share what he wants with people he knows well: close friends, relatives, familiar clergy"--the social network that helps create meaning and safety for a particular person.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, March 02, 2004
Dissin' narrative
"The idea of the self as something wholly constructed out of the narratives we create about our lives has become a staple across the humanities. But it's utter nonsense, says Galen Strawson, considering Making Stories by Jerome Bruner." (From Guardian Unlimited).: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, March 02, 2004
Consciousness explained?
Three books try to explain consciousness as a biological phenomenon--from Scientific American..: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, March 02, 2004
Belief and the brain
"Until sometime between their third and fourth birthdays," writes Rebecca Saxe in the Boston Review, "young children seem not to understand that the relationship between a person's goals and her actions depends on the person's beliefs about the current state of the world."It's this capacity to believe (and attribute belief to others), she says, that "enables us to predict one another's conduct, coordinate for the common good, and suffer the sorrows of Romeo and Juliet when we get things wrong."
Although she doesn't refer specifically to religious belief, Saxe's article has interesting implications for those of us who work with narrative approaches to meaning-making (including the meanings we make of religious/spiritual experience) and constructionist ideas about social interaction and religious experience.
This brief article provides an interesting summary of recent research into the brain and its contributions to "human nature," concluding that the ability to believe/attribute belief is innate, univeral, and unique to Homo sapiens.
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, March 02, 2004
"The Working Poor"
As class issues become more important to the work of pastoral theologians, there's an entirely new stream of literature that asks our attention.The latest behemoth of a text to emerge on class and American culture tells the stories of largely unseen Americans who work and still "suffer the barbed indignities of poverty."
Here's the New York Times review of The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler.
"There are 35 million people in the country living in poverty," writes reviewer Ron Suskind (known himself for his work on race, class and equality in American education). "Most of the adults in that group work nowadays; many of them work full time. And while there are heavy concentrations of African-Americans and white single women in the mix, the group is every bit as diverse, and diffuse, as the nation is."
Suskind says the text is "clearly one of those seminal books that every American should read and read now."
.: Posted by Duane Bidwell on Tuesday, March 02, 2004