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."
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.
Bro ... I took a few classes with him at Northwestern Univ during my PhD work. I was studying elements of 'narrative and virtue theory' and his work on narrative psychology helped make some sense of a few things empirically. I even connected him and Hauerwas a bit. McADams ended up serving on my doctoral committee. ... strange world eh??
McAdams helped me finally articulate that humans (in my view) are meaning-making creatures more than truth-seeking creatures. That’s been a helpful shift for me.
I like this - meaning-making vs. truth-seeking. My husband is reading through Iain McGilchrist's book The Matter with Things (slowly! It's very dense), and he talks a lot about how the left brain wants to analyze and break down, but the right brain is what synthesizes and finds meaning. And that we're living in a very left-brain heavy society.
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."
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.
Bro ... I took a few classes with him at Northwestern Univ during my PhD work. I was studying elements of 'narrative and virtue theory' and his work on narrative psychology helped make some sense of a few things empirically. I even connected him and Hauerwas a bit. McADams ended up serving on my doctoral committee. ... strange world eh??
Isn’t that something?
McAdams helped me finally articulate that humans (in my view) are meaning-making creatures more than truth-seeking creatures. That’s been a helpful shift for me.
I like this - meaning-making vs. truth-seeking. My husband is reading through Iain McGilchrist's book The Matter with Things (slowly! It's very dense), and he talks a lot about how the left brain wants to analyze and break down, but the right brain is what synthesizes and finds meaning. And that we're living in a very left-brain heavy society.