The Crucifixion of Jesus: A Perspective from Family Systems Theory

Over the centuries Christians have used various ideas to try to explain their belief that the crucifixion of Jesus had consequences that were far-reaching and beneficial. I think it is helpful to think freshly about this, and to come up with new ideas that can go along side the traditional ones. In a previous blog I suggested an analogy with photosynthesis, i.e. between what a plant does to heal an injured atmosphere and what Jesus does to heal the moral and spiritual atmosphere in which humanity lives.

Read the article in full on my Blog.

Social Brain Theory and the Size of Churches

I have recently become aware of an intriguing convergence between the Social Brain theory of Professor Robin Dunbar at Oxford, and the Congregation Size theory that has been developed largely in the USA.

Dunbar is best known for ‘Dunbar’s number’, 150, the number of people with whom we can maintain stable social relationships. However, Dunbar actually recognizes a series of numbers such as 5, 15, 50, 150, 500 etc. Each number represents a barrier. If you want to go beyond it, you need different bonding strategies that are more time-efficient, and the nature of your relationships changes.

Read Social Brain Theory and the Size of Churches in full on my website.

Varieties of Music: Varieties of Religion

Different kinds of music have different effects on people; understanding how that works is one of the tasks of the psychology of music. I would very much like to see that applied to different kinds of religious music. Different kinds of religion develop close links with particular kinds of music. You can tell a lot about different forms of Christianity by looking at what kinds of music they are associated with.

Read Varieties of Music: Varieties of Religion in full on my website.

Scientific and Religious Approaches to Mental Health

Much of my work has been on science and religion, particularly psychology and religion. There are many specific topics to consider from that point of view, but circumstances have led me to focus recently on mental health and wellbeing.

As far as psychosis is concerned I see no incompatibility between the medical approach and a spiritual approach.

Read Scientific and Religious Approaches to Mental Health in full on my website.

How Black-and-White Are You in Your Thinking?

Some people think in black and white terms; some see things in terms of shades of grey. Some people make a clear, confident choice, one way or the other; others instinctively look for a middle way. Some people see an issue as clear-cut; other people can see both sides of a question.

Of course, few of us go entirely one way of the other. All of us tend to be more clear cut, more black and white, about things we are passionate about.  Also, stress shifts us all to being more black and white in our thinking

Read How Black-and-White Are You in Your Thinking? in full.

Computer Intelligence Becomes a Religion

Over my lifetime there have been massive developments in what computers can do. But it is something it is very difficult to take a balanced view about. A lot of those who are most expert seem to have a vested interest in exaggerating what they can do. Those who are more ignorant about computers tend to minimise the very significant advances they have made.

The trouble is that predictions about what computers will soon be able to do shades off into fantasy and science fiction, and it is not easy to tell sense from nonsense. There is a curious jumble of hopes and fears involved, some of which seem to be quite primitive psychologically.

Read 'Computer Intelligence Becomes a Religion' in full.

Relating Theory and Practice

One of the enduring social challenges is to find better ways of relating ‘theory’ and ‘practice’.

It is always a problem in professional training. Trainees can be taught the ‘theory’ but that doesn’t always mean they know what to do. For example teachers can be taught the theory of education in College, but that doesn’t always make them good teachers. It is also not difficult to give them classroom experience, but that doesn’t make them good teachers either. The problem is to find a good way of connecting theory and practice, in a way that lifts professional performance.

The problem was brought home to me very vividly by something I heard many years ago in a lecture by the late John Davy, who was then Science Editor of the Observer. He was talking about how anatomy was taught to medical students in the 16th century. He said it took three people. There was someone who read from Galen’s studies of anatomy, written in the 2nd century. There was also a barber who cut up a dead body. Thirdly, there was a Professor whose job it was to connect up what was being read from Galen with the corpse that was being cut up. Quite a challenge!

Read Relating Theory and Practice in full.

How to Keep your 2018 New Year Resolutions

Many of us made New Year resolutions, and many of us have probably broken them already. In fact, about 80% of people fail to stick to their resolutions for longer than six weeks. Although we don’t need research to tell us that, but research helps us to understand more about what is going on, why we make resolutions, why they fail, and how we might do it better. Consultant Psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud and former Consultant Psychiatrist and author Dr Peter Bruggen have recently provided a helpful summary of some of the recent research.

Read How to Keep your2018 New Year Resolutions in full.

Why Should Christians Do Good?

Most people (Christians and otherwise) think that Christians should do good in the world, and I agree with them. But I think it makes a lot of difference why they should do that. For some time I have noticed that some of the reasons Christians give for doing good inspire me, while others leave me cold. I have been thinking over why that should be.

I grew up in Coventry, and those who know me well know how excited I was by the opening of the new Cathedral when I was 16, an excitement that has never left me. The new cathedral arose from the ashes of the old one, bombed by Germany in WWII. From the outset the new Cathedral ommitted itself to building a more reconciled world, at first working for improved Anglo-German relations but increasingly working with partners across the globe for a more reconciled world everywhere. That inspired me.

Read the article in full on my website.

Why Feeling Good About Ourselves is Good for Those Around Us

How do your feelings about yourself affect how you treat others? I think there are two very different views about this, and people can feel quite strongly about it.

Some people assume that feeling good about yourself makes you self-centred and arrogant, and leads to treating other people badly. Others assume that feeling good about yourself makes you less defensive and threatened and leads to treating other people better.

This is an empirical matter, and one that can be settled by psychological research, and I think the answer is very clear: feeling good about yourself leads to treating other people well.

There are many studies showing a positive correlation between self-esteem and helping behaviour (and positive attitudes to other people). But there is now experimental evidence to back this up, in a recent British research summarised in Psychology Today.

Some participants (teenagers) gave themselves mini self-affirmations. They were asked whether they had forgiven someone else, or been concerned about their happiness, etc. If they said ‘Yes’, they were asked to give examples. They were compared with people who were asked neutral questions about the weather, etc.

A month later, the people who had recalled acts of kindness to other people were more likely to have engaged in more such acts. The researchers thought that was because the questions had led to self-affirmations, which in turn had made the teenagers less defensive and more outgoing. That interpretation fits a large body of other research.

I think this has broad social implications. Society seems to be getting more cynical and less inclined to treat each other well.  This is evidenced a lot on social media and especially true of those who feel under threat. For example, it is those who feel most insecure about their own employment or personal circumstances who are most concerned to stop immigrants ‘taking their jobs’. That can lead on to all sorts of hostility.

If society is not to fall apart we need to find ways in which people feel affirmed and supported and supportive rather than threatened. Only then will we be able to feel good about ourselves and treat each other well. 

This article was originally posted on www.frasernwatts.com 

Why Christmas music in shops is bad for you

I’ve always dreaded the constant replay of Christmas music in shops. From Carols to popular music and the classic Christmas tunes that are trotted out every festive season. There are no doubt various reasons for feeling this way about them, and I know I’m not alone in it. Some people really don’t like carols, others aren’t fans of the classics and while some new ones become hits there are others that miss.

I think my dread of hearing songs in shops comes from the fact that I actually rather like carols, particularly the real old carols that are basically ancient folk music for Christmas. What the shops play are mainly Victorian Christmas hymns, which I and others like less.

You also tend to find that shops tend to play souped-up arrangements of carols. There may be something significant in what those arrangements do to the rhythm.

Read the full article on my website.

My New Book on Living ‘Deeply’

I have recently handed in ms. of my latest book to Lutterworth Press. It is called “Living Deeply”. It is linked to a set of film clips that will shortly be available on YouTube for free download. This book absorbs the text of the film clips, but expands it considerably. The book is about how to live, and draws on both psychology and spirituality in an integrated way.

We had lengthy discussions about the title for this material. A previous version was called the “beta course”, but that is fairly uninformative and has already been used by others. For a while we thought of calling it ‘metanoia’, but we decided that was too obscure. We then got as far as thinking we wanted a two word title with ‘living’ as one of the words but what should be other work be? Eventually we went for ‘deeply’.

Read the article in full on my blog.

Spirituality and Life Satisfaction

Daniel José Camacho wrote in the Guardian recently about research from the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) on people who are ‘spiritual but not religious’.

PRRI and Florida State University jointly conducted a national survey in the US, measuring spirituality by self-reported experiences of being connected to something bigger than oneself, and religion by frequency of religious attendance and the personal importance of religion.

Read the article in full on my blog.

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.

What Christians can contribute to Mental Health

Mental Health has been much in the news recently, partly as a result of the initiative of the young Royals. This raises the question of what contribution Churches and other religious organisations can make to mental health.

Theos, the admirable think tank on Church and Society, recently published a report on Christianity and Mental Health, written by Ben Ryan.

I recently contributed a blog myself on the Theos site, on spiritual aspects of depression. While I would never wish depression on anyone, I suggest that a spiritual perspective is better able to see that, despite the misery, depression can have some value. It can give people more honesty, depth and resilience. This is what Christianity is typically about. It never welcomes adversity, but it is committed to bringing good out of it, and has resources to help to do that.

Read the full article on my website.

Fraser Watts on the big questions of life… ‘How do I want to be remembered?’

As winter draws in I’ve been thinking about Ebenezer Scrooge’s experience in the tale ‘A Christmas Carol’. Do you remember it?  

The Ghost of Christmas Future gave Ebenezer a glimpse of his destiny – and he saw how people remembered him and talked about him. He had an insight so that he could see how his legacy was shaping up, and had the power to change it if he wanted to.

Have you thought about what your legacy would look like? How would people remember you and talk about you?

No matter your religion or faith there’s an important life lesson in the story of Ebenezer.

Read the full article on my blog.