Living Deeply – the inner personal journey

For the last two months I have been very focused on completing my latest book, ‘Living Deeply’. It is always exciting, and a relief, to complete a book, and I will be celebrating.

Some years ago my colleagues in the University of Cambridge Psychology and Religion Research Group produced the ‘Beta Course’. It was a psychologically oriented introduction to Christianity, with a focus on ‘Being Christian, Becoming Whole and Building Community’. We tried to bring psychology and Christianity together to help people with personal growth and pastoral care.

Read the article in full on my website.

Social Media and Inhumanity

Fraser Watts talks about the psychological dangers in the over-use of social media.

I read with interest an article by Rhiannon Williams about the dangers inherent in over-use of social media such as Facebook, and the belated recognition of these dangers by former Facebook President Sean Parker.

Looking back on the creation of Facebook he now sees that “it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other … It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Read the article in full on my website.

Fraser Watts on Spirituality in the Work Place

There is increasing interest in spirituality in many different settings, and now it is entering the work place, as Lynette Reed from business.com says here.

It is interesting to reflect on the assumptions behind this. It is partly a recognition of the full potential richness of human nature. Humans are Homo Spiritualis, the spiritual species. Spirituality is just part of human nature, and one that cannot be easily ignored. It seems that early spiritual practices like trance dancing played a really important role in human evolution and helped to make us such a successful species. Even secular humanism has had to adapt to recognize that humans are inherently spiritual.

Read teh full article on my website.

The Inner Journey: Psychology And/Or Spirituality

In talking about the inner journey it is helpful to draw on the perspectives of both psychology and spirituality. Keeping both perspectives in play gives us a kind of ‘binocular vision’ on the journey. Looked at in one way, it is a psychological journey of personal growth. Looked at in the other way it is a journey into greater spiritual depth. Because it is both of these things, we miss out if we adopt just one perspective and not the other.

In our present situation is doubly important to use both languages. Neither the language of psychology, nor the language of spirituality works for everyone. We live in a fragmented society in which different people look at things from different perspectives; we can no longer rely on a single way of understanding things and expect everyone to understand.

Read the article in full on my website.

The Christian significance of psychology

I am currently preparing to lead a workshop on ‘The Christian Significance of Psychology’ for the British Association of Christians in Psychology. As I explain in a blog on the BACIP website, the original interest was in what difference being a Christian makes in psychology. However, I thought I needed to come at that through the more basic question of the Christian significance of psychology itself.

https://www.bacip.org.uk/blog

My starting point is the belief that Christ made a significant difference to the direction of human evolution, especially to how human consciousness and experience have developed. In the first part of the morning I will try to set out that view, leaning heavily on Owen Barfield and others influenced by Rudolf Steiner (though Barfield is best known as close friend of C S Lewis). I propose that Christ changed the direction of human evolution. Had it not been for that, humanity would hardly have been in a position to develop psychology, or at least it would have looked very different.

In the second half of the morning I will turn to the significance of the development of something explicitly called ‘psychology’. Various strands contributed to that, including the implicit cognitivism of Enlightenment philosophy, the Protestant concern with self-examination, and the scientism of Auguste Comte and others. From a Christian point of view it is a somewhat mixed inheritance.

I will try to locate it within the Christocentric view of the evolution of consciousness that I will set out in the first session. I will take as a particular case study how the development of psychology affected our understanding of  emotion, following the work of Professor Thomas Dixon, my former PhD student, who directs the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary in the University of London.

http://www.history.qmul.ac.uk/staff/profile/4525-dr-thomas-dixon

After lunch I will explore whether, and in what sense, psychology is a quasi-religion, and the range of attitudes to psychology to be found among religious commentators. I will steer a path between those who are strongly pro and anti psychology, suggesting that psychology can go either way when interpreted from the perspective of the purposes of God.

However, on balance, I am more enthusiastic about the potential of psychology than I am anxious about it becoming misdirected. I hope that will yield a Christian evaluation of psychology, which will have pointers for how Christians would want to steer psychology. Roger Bretherton will lead a workshop in the final part of the day to explore that further.

This BACIP day will be held in Sutton Coldfield on Saturday 18th November. Everyone is welcome. For both information and to book see

https://www.bacip.org.uk/events

I look forward to seeing a number of old friend there and to meeting new ones.