This week’s dialogue prompt is:
Suppose that you are at a Christian liberal arts college, majoring in psychology and planning to concentrate your vocational efforts in this field (this should not be a stretch for most of you!). You received e-mails this past week from two old high school friends. All of you are “people oriented” and are planning some future career in a professional role that allows direct service to others. Your friend Chris decided to attend a Bible Institute, while your friend Jamie went to a secular state university. Read the following email excerpts and respond to the questions that follow.
From Chris: “. . I’m not sure why you have ended up there. It just seems to me that you are wasting your time studying ‘human wisdom’ as expressed in psychology when there is no end to what we can learn about God’s wisdom through His Word! You’ve said you want to be a Christian counselor and really help people in truly lasting ways, right? So why bother appealing to anything else but what is fundamentally Christian?”
From Jamie: “. . my psych coursework—it’s really challenging and I have lots of flexibility in my curriculum. I guess that you have to study the Bible or take religion courses there, don’t you? Doesn’t that seem like a waste of time when you want to get at the real stuff? It seems to me that religion has been unable to keep current with what people need. It seems outmoded in terms of specific ways to help people compared to the real scientific evidence available today, right? I’d be interested to know what you think.”
1. Write a response to each of your friends remembering you want to strike a balance between truth and sensitivity.
2. Specify the advantages/disadvantages you see in each of their perspectives?
Our experiences and faith traditions may direct us differently as we disc
