How do Christians in the twenty-first century understand psychological disorders? What does Scripture have to teach us about these conditions? Marcia Webb examines attitudes about psychological disorder in the church today, and compares them to the scriptural testimony. She offers theological and psychological insights to help contemporary Christians integrate biblical perspectives with current scientific knowledge about mental illness.

The intention of Trauma Sensitive Theology is to help theologians, professors, clergy, spiritual care givers, and therapists speak well of God and faith without further wounding survivors of trauma. It explores the nature of traumatic exposure, response, processing, and recovery and its impact on constructive theology and pastoral leadership and care. Through the lenses of contemporary traumatology, somatics, and the Internal Family Systems model of psychotherapy, the text offers a framework for seeing trauma and its impact in the lives of individuals, communities, society, and within our own sacred texts. It argues that care of traumatic wounding must include all dimensions of the human person, including our spiritual practices, religious rituals and community participation, and theological thinking. As such, clergy and spiritual care professionals have an important role to play in the recovery of traumatic wounding and fostering of resiliency. This book explores how trauma-informed congregational leaders can facilitate resiliency and offers one way of thinking theologically in response to traumatizing abuses of relational power and our resources for restoration.

Grace for the Afflicted is written to educate Christians about mental illness from both biblical and scientific perspectives. Stanford presents insights into our physical and spiritual nature and discusses the appropriate role of psychology and psychiatry in the life of the believer. Describing common mental disorders, Stanford asks of each: "What does science say and what does the Bible say about this illness?"--Publisher description.

Is the human self singular and unified or essentially plural? This book explores the seemingly disparate ways that Christian theology and the secular human sciences have approached this complex question. The latter have largely embraced the idea of the plural self as an inescapable, even adaptive feature of psychological life. Contemporary Christian theology, by contrast, has largely neglected recent psychological accounts of the naturalness of self-plurality, and has sought to reaffirm the self's unity in opposition to those postmodern theorists who would dismantle it. Through an original analysis of recent theological and secular accounts of self and personhood, this book examines the extent of the intertheoretical disparity and its broader implications for theology's dialogue with the human sciences in general, and psychology in particular. It explains why theologians ought to take questions about the plurality of self very seriously, and how they overlap with many of the central concerns of contemporary theological anthropology, including the notions of relationality, particularity and human sinfulness. Introducing a novel psychological framework to distinguish various understandings of self-disunity, the author argues that contemporary theology's blanket condemnation of self-multiplicity is misconceived, and identifies a possible means of reconciling theological and human scientific accounts.

Is it possible to develop such a thing as a biblical theology of mental health? How might we develop a helpful and pastoral use of scripture to explore questions of mental health within a Christian framework? This timely and important book integrates the highest levels of biblical scholarship with theological and pastoral concerns to consider how we use scripture when dealing with mental health issues.

People living with mental health challenges are not excluded from God’s love or even the fullness of life promised by Jesus. Unfortunately, this hope is often lost amid the well-meaning labels and medical treatments that dominate the mental health field today. In Finding Jesus in the Storm, John Swinton makes the case for reclaiming that hope by changing the way we talk about mental health and remembering that, above all, people are people, regardless of how unconventionally they experience life. Finding Jesus in the Storm is a call for the church to be an epicenter of compassion for those experiencing depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and related difficulties. That means breaking free of the assumptions that often accompany these diagnoses, allowing for the possibility that people living within unconventional states of mental health might experience God in unique ways that are real and perhaps even revelatory. In each chapter, Swinton gives voice to those experiencing the mental health challenges in question, so readers can see firsthand what God’s healing looks like in a variety of circumstances. The result is a book about people instead of symptoms, description instead of diagnosis, and lifegiving hope for everyone in the midst of the storm.

This handbook surveys the many relationships between scientific studies of the world around us and Christian concepts of the Divine from the ancient Greeks to modern ecotheology. From Augustine to Hildegard of Bingen, Genesis to Frederick Douglass, and physics to sociology, this volume opens the intersections of Christian theology and science to new concepts, voices, and futures. The central goal of the handbook is to bring new perspectives to the foreground of Christian theological engagement with science, and to highlight the many engagements today that are not often identified as 'science-theology' discussions. The handbook thus includes several aspects not found in previous handbooks on the same topic: significant representation from the three major branches of Christianity-Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant; multiple essays on areas of modern science not traditionally part of the “theology and science” dialogue, such as discussions of race, medicine, and sociology; a collection of essays on historical theologians' approaches to nature and science. T&T Clark Handbook to Christian Theology and the Modern Sciences is divided into 3 sections: historical explorations, encompassing a eleven chapters from Aristotle to Frederick Douglass; Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox surveys of theology-science scholarship in the 20th and 21st centuries; and ten explorations in Christian theology today, from Einsteinian physics to decolonial sociology. The 24 chapters than span the volume offer the reader, whether scholar, student, or layperson, an essential resource for any future conversations around science and Christian theology.