Reflections
Everybody Prays
“Everybody prays.” This simple pronoun and verb pairing begins the 1982 book Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer, written by Jungian theologians Ann and Barry Ulanov. And it is true,…
Essential Readings in Integration: Toward Mutual Recognition by Dr. Marie Hoffman
Someone somewhere, and I swear it was David Brooks, said publicly the act of writing is in no small part an act of directing a desert people to water. Like…
Sacred Conversations
When I was a kid, I used to pray to the good Lord that I might be blessed with the capacity to shoot lasers from my eyes. I bargained. I…
Forgive.
Because psychology is such a culturally bound field-so many of its purported truths prove specific to a particular era and location-it reveals only few precious trends that really transcend its…
Neurotheology, explained.
When pursuing an advanced degree, make up words. That is what my colleagues and I used to tell one another in the days of theses and dissertations. The directive might…
The Psychological Lives of Clergy and Their Congregations
Back in 2007, the University of Chicago put out a study examining job satisfaction among American professionals. As the results came in, trends became clear. “The most satisfying jobs are…
Of Integration and Bicycles
A previous supervisor of mine, beloved and idolized in my training years, recently passed away. An affecting memorial gathering reunited me with some old peers, and we once again marveled…
Good Mourning.
Mourning is a rather inefficient human process. It is notoriously subjective. It shows little uniformity in severity or duration across populations, and so it regularly defies real scientific standardization. It is no…
Therapy Should Not Be an Echo Chamber
Chatbot therapists are actually nothing new. In the 1960s, Joseph Weizenbaum at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab created Eliza. It was an early computational model designed to emulate human interaction, in the…
A Pentecostal Reflection from Vampire Weekend
Goes the Vampire Weekend song: Anger wants a voice Voices wanna sing Singers harmonize ‘Til they can’t hear anything I thought that I was free From all that questionin’ But…
Freud and Pfister: A Love Story
A Psychoanalyst and a Pastor – unlikely yet natural companions Early twentieth-century Vienna was bustling. A young physician named Sigmund Freud, after experimenting with hypnosis (among other things, ahem), began…
The Apartment
So, you tire of running Elf, The Grinch, and Jingle All the Way on loop.[1] Here is a holiday picture you may not have watched yet: Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. …
For National Suicide Prevention Month
We do not talk about suicide much. We tend to procrastinate on the issue; we wait until crises strike. So, those frantic conversations we do have usually claw at ways…
Clinicians Need Clergy
By some counts, a quarter or more of Americans seeking mental health care turn to faith leaders first. This is according to a 2020 study out of Brigham Young University.…
When am I talking about Faith?
An old supervisor of mine had a coffee mug that always made me chuckle. Depicted was a cartoonish Sigmund Freud, coffee mug in hand, next to the words “Freudian Slip:…