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Matt Johnson's avatar

Good stuff, I'll check out the book. Another title that I feel addresses the gray area between psychology / theology extremely well is Kathleen Norris's book Acedia and Me. She helped me name some deep features in my experience that I couldn't quite get at through a psychological / therapeutic lens, while still validating mental illness / therapy as legitimate. The key for acedia is getting active with something tangible / tactile, not too dissimilar from "doing the next thing."

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Brandon J. O'Brien's avatar

Are you familiar with Dan McAdams' work on narrative identify formation? I thought of that a time or two throughout this review. He argues that America's metanarrative for identify formation is "redemption" (or what Vonnegut called the "man in a hole" plot)—an up-and-to-the-right shape that Americans assume their life will ultimately take. If he's right, that might mean that Americans are almost constitutionally unable to admit that our lives are not, in fact, moving up and to the right at all times. We have very little imagination for another narrative shape.

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