We tend to take these claims for granted: “Human beings are essentially relational.” “No man is an island.” “We’re created for connection.” “We’re made for relationships.” And testing the limits of this can be pretty much diabolical. Evan Rosa traces two stories of parental deprivation: Harry Harlow's Monkey Love Experiments and the horror of 1990's discovery of Romanian asylums for orphans, documented in the 1990 report "The Shame of a Nation,” on 20/20. Then psychologist Mari Clements (Glenville State College, formerly Fuller School of Psychology) discusses the importance of healthy marriage dynamics for young children’s development and how it provides a secure emotional base; the relational imago Dei; the close emotional bonds that must take place early in life in order to provide the relational stability relational creatures need; we talk about important phases of human development, into adulthood; and the theological backdrop to these questions of the human drive and need for emotional connection. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.
We tend to take these claims for granted: “Human beings are essentially relational.” “No man is an island.” “We’re created for connection.” “We’re made for relationships.” And testing the limits of this can be pretty much diabolical. Evan Rosa traces two stories of parental deprivation: Harry Harlow's "Monkey Love Experiments" and the horror of 1990's discovery of Romanian asylums for orphans, documented in the 1990 report "The Shame of a Nation,” on 20/20.
Then psychologist Mari Clements (Glenville State College, formerly Fuller School of Psychology) discusses the importance of healthy marriage dynamics for young children’s development and how it provides a secure emotional base; the relational imago Dei; the close emotional bonds that must take place early in life in order to provide the relational stability relational creatures need; we talk about important phases of human development, into adulthood; and the theological backdrop to these questions of the human drive and need for emotional connection.
This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.
About Mari Clements
Mari Clements is Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Professor of Psychology at Glenville State College. Prior to this, she taught at Fuller School of Psychology and Penn State University.
Show Notes
Production Notes
This transcript was generated automatically, and may contain errors.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. Visit us online at faith.yale.edu. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint1543. For more information, visit blueprint1543.org.
Before we get going, a brief word of caution. My opening comments in today's episode touch on some disturbing content about parental deprivation of animals and children. And if you're sensitive about these things, consider skipping ahead a few minutes until you're into the interview portion of the episode.
Mari Clements: I think that it's very clear that people were made for relationships. Part of the impetus around this idea of attachment and this idea of understanding relationships in early infancy was birthed out of this tragic finding of all these war infants who were in orphanages, where their needs were being taken care of. They had shelter, they had food, they had clothing. These infants had everything they needed to survive in terms of physical things, but they were wasting away because they weren't having the human contact. They weren't having the interaction. They weren't having warmth and affection and love. I think humans were created for a relationship, and I think that is part of the way in which we are created in the image of God.
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World, a podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity. I'm Evan Rosa with the Yale Center for Faith and Culture. We tend to take for granted certain claims like, "human beings are essentially relational. No man is an island. We're created for connection. We're made for relationships." And testing the limits of this can be pretty much diabolical.
Harry Harlow: Let me show you a monkey raised on a nursing wire mother.
Evan Rosa: That's Harry Harlow, a mid-20th century behavioral psychologist, introducing his infamous monkey love experiments.
Harry Harlow: Here's baby 106. Wow. He's going to the wire mother. It's got to eat to live.
Evan Rosa: By today's standards, probably unethical. Harlow set up studies with infant monkeys, all rhesus macaques, setting up a variety of ways in which they could be deprived of their real mothers during their first 90 days after birth. There were two surrogate mothers in their cage, a metal wire frame mother that provided food and a cozy terrycloth mother that didn't, almost like a stuffed animal.
Harry Harlow: We had predicted that the variable of contact comfort would be a variable of measurable importance, but we were unprepared to find that it completely overwhelmed and overshadowed all other variables, including those of nursing.
Evan Rosa: If they were raised with these surrogate mothers for longer than 90 days, they became permanently timid, antisocial, easily bullied, poor mates and poor parents.
Later experiments would separate them entirely and this complete deprivation drove the monkeys to severe anxiety, panic disorders, fear, and in some cases, total chaos, a kind of breakdown of their sense of self.
Harry Harlow: This gives us part of the picture of the strength of infantile love.
Evan Rosa: But Harlow's monkey love experiments brought some scientific backing to the idea that at the dawn of life, attachment to a caregiver, in a caregiver's sensitive, comforting response, or at least the perception of that, was essential. The maternal deprivation was emotionally damaging.
Harry Harlow: What do you mean by saying that a baby loves its mother? Certainly one thing we mean is that it gets a great feeling of security in the presence of the mother.
Evan Rosa: Fast forward thirty years. Under communist rule until 1989, Romanian orphanages and asylums with a sight of horror and a quote, "genocide of neglect," as documented by Barbara Walters on 20/20's report, The Shame of a Nation, which aired in 1990.
Reporter #1: Most of what we will show you has never been seen before on American television.
Reporter #2: In more than 50 institutions hidden in remote areas of Romania, innocent children are locked away like condemned prisoners. These are not the orphanages seen before on American television. These are state-run asylums, shrouded in secrecy. This is where children with physical or mental defects are banished by a government which has branded them worthless.
Evan Rosa: This graphic segment featured truly horrifying video documentation of children long deprived of the personal contact of a caregiver. They weren't hugged. They weren't touched.
Reporter #1: Conditions are so shameful. The gates are padlocked. Outsiders rarely get in. This is why.
Reporter #3: This is a place that's designed to get rid of these children, and it's being done in the most inhumane and undignified way possible.
Evan Rosa: Of course, this raises many questions, all of them disturbing, horrifying. But it places the question of our essential relatedness in sharp relief. It's not as simple as helping our privileged young ones to thrive. It is in fact a matter of survival at time. We are made for relationships, and if we don't get them at a crucial time in our early lives, then we wither and we lose something essential about ourselves.
Today, we're continuing our series on bringing psychology to theology with a look at this essential feature of the human species: our absolute need for love and nurture, especially as young children and especially through loving families.
At this point, we've explored questions of authority and how to integrate psychology and theology, both being so deeply concerned with human nature. We've considered difficult emotions like anger and spiritual struggle, the structure of human thriving, the psychology of doubt and ambiguity in matters of religious faith, and how a theology of the Imago Dei might benefit from psychological science.
My guest today specializes in marriage and family psychology, child clinical psychology, in particular. Mari Clements is Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and professor of psychology at Glenville State College in West Virginia, and spent many years at Fuller School of Psychology prior to that. We discussed the importance of healthy marriage dynamics for young children's development and how it provides a secure emotional base.
We talk about the relational Imago Dei, the close emotional bonds that must take place early in life in order to provide the relational stability that we relational creatures need. And we talk about the important phases of human development well into adulthood, and then the theological backdrop with these questions on the human drive and need for emotional connection.
Thanks for listening today.
Mari Clements: The thing in psychology that I'm most interested and excited about is the intersection between how parents' marital relationship influences their children and also how it influences them. So said most generally, my interests are in the effects of marital conflict on family members, particularly children, but not exclusively children.
And that's a really hopeful area because there are all sorts of ways in which we can effectively intervene. The problem is that couples, Christian couples, secular couples, all couples, tend to vote with their feet by going to see a divorce lawyer instead of a therapist. Problems can be prevented, problems can be resolved, but not if you don't trust.
And the other big mistake that people make is waiting until they're really done. If you intervene early in a problem, it's much easier to fix than if you're stuck in this channelized, repeated, over and over again difficulty that has already created tremendous damage for you and your partner and your children. That's much harder than if you go early.
So it's kind of like preventive medical care as opposed to being admitted to the hospital in acute septic shock. There are interventions that work, even with acute septic shock. My colleague, Terry Hargrave, does a form of marital therapy referred to as restoration therapy and has had some really great results with couples who are on the brink of divorce. He does an intensive intervention in-person, residential. People come for, like, a week or so at retreats in Texas and work super hard on their marriage. And they've seen couples who literally were this close to a divorce be able to turn it around. So that's brilliant.
I tend to work more on the prevention end of things.
Evan Rosa: When you think about that thing that excites you so much and what you might call your life's work, like what you really want to leave and imprint in the world, what's the theological motivation behind that for you?
Mari Clements: It's all about helping people be their best selves, be the people, the role models, the Christians, the individuals that God created them to be. And they're not able to do that if they're stuck in tremendous pain and conflict. They're not able to raise up a child the way that the child should go if they are not in a relationship that honors their partner because in honoring their partner in that relationship, they're also honoring what God created marriage to be.
There are two things that I wish I could just put on billboards everywhere. The first one is if you stay in your marriage for the sake of the children, then you deserve, and your child deserves, for you to work on your marriage for the sake of the children. Just being together is actually not better for kids. The kids who look really bad, or the kids whose parents are engaged in repeated and nasty and awful conflict, then they're not getting good models for how to solve problems in their own relationships. They're not getting good models for what to expect from marriage. They're not getting good models for what that marriage relationship is supposed to be. So that's one thing.
The other thing I wish I could emblazon on the minds of parents everywhere is in our study with 126 families with four-year-old children, we ask everybody in the family, "what's the conflict like between the parents?" Everybody, we ask the mom, we ask the dad, we ask the four-year-old and we ask the parents what they thought the four-year-old thought. And the most common comment by far was, "I don't think our child even notices when we argue." Not a single four-year-old told me that. Not one, not a single one.
So I think that's a really striking thing. Kids are really attuned. That marital relationship is foundational to their sense of safety in the world, their emotional security. That's a construct that was derived by Davies and Cummings, who are some really brilliant psychologists. And they were really looking at "what does that marital relationship provide for the child?"
And much as when we think about attachment per se, in infants, the marital relationship actually performs a secure emotional base that children are then able to use as they are exploring the interpersonal world, if you will. Sadly, marital conflict is associated with every negative outcome you can think of for children from depression, to conduct disorder, to school failure to et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And so it's a really big risk factor that is addressable, is fixable. I mean, that's the hopeful thing. So that's what makes this area of research so attractive to me.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. So one of my enduring questions has been, "where can we find those links back to the theological claim that human persons bear the image and likeness of God?"
And so I want to camp out on this one for a little bit and also start by saying something I noticed in thinking about the marriage relationship and raising children as a kind of stewardship.
Mari Clements: It is.
Evan Rosa: And so, well, not a kind of stewardship. It might be considered one of the most important elements of or most important kinds of stewardship. And that in fact is a theological claim that human beings have been given...
Mari Clements: It's a sacred responsibility. Yeah, it really is. I think that's true. I also think that marriage itself, so not just the parenting piece, but marriage itself, is... it appears in the Bible throughout the Bible, right? We start in Genesis with Adam and Eve, and we end in Revelation with the churches, the bride of Christ. So I think it's fair to say that marriage is important to God. And I also think it's fair to say that marriages should be glorifying to God.
I knew a pastor when I was a teenager who said something that has stuck with me all these years, and he said that in your relationship you should glorify God better together than you would separately. And that, I think, is a really important thing that we often lose. People can get really pragmatic or really instrumental about their relationships and it's hard to think about when you're juggling all the tasks. You know, what it's like to have a job, what it's like to have a home that needs cleaning, what it's like to have children who need ferry to this activity, that activity.
It can be easy to get lost in the mundane, but I think that that exhortation that everything we do we need to be doing to the glory of God is particularly true when we think about what are the messages we're giving our kids? Because I do think that there's a very important connection between how it is that children see their parents and how it is they typically see God. There are connections, not perfect, obviously, one-to-one mapping on, but there are connections between how children see their parents and how they see God.
Not that those can't be overcome because no parent is ever going to be perfect, right? There's not an image of God that is going to be exactly like an image of a parent, but there's certainly images of parents and behaviors of parents that can get in the way of people having a good image of God. So for instance, if a child has a parent whose love for them is very conditional or appears to be very conditional, based on their behavior, based on their grades, based on their whatever, they can begin to see God in that way. And they can try and earn their salvation and feel like they never will be able to measure up and that's a problem.
Similarly, if they have a parent who is erring on the other side: that child can do no wrong—I think on Reddit they call the "Karens," so the mom who, the mom who's incredibly entitled and thinks that her child can do no wrong and defends them in front of everything— so a parent who doesn't help a child see how they can grow, that's also not honoring. That's also going to give a false picture. And neither one of those are actually loving, even though they may be done with the best of intentions.
I mean, that's the interesting thing about people. Even when they're doing terrible things, they often are doing them for good reasons, right? So in therapy, you can hear couples say incredibly hurtful and awful things to each other. So for instance, we had a wife who, just flaying her husband using really strong language, really painful things, and we stopped the interaction. We said, "help me to understand. What were you trying to do there?" And what it boiled down to, what she ended up saying is, "I was just trying to get his attention. He's not listening."
And so paradoxically, we do things that can be awful for good reasons, but we're not going to get where we want to go because if you've just been flayed and you're laying there bleeding, you're not going to hear what your partner wants to say. And the brilliant thing is there are really simple tools that can be taught, that people can learn their skills, like anything else, that people can learn and they can use, and they can prevent those kinds of nasty, horrible interchanges.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. Honing in on, I think about the relationality of human persons, and if we're looking for psychological evidence for theological claims, then it looks like the Christian vision of not just humanity, but of God's very self, is deeply relational. So I wonder if you could talk about the image of God insofar as it's relational. What does that mean to you, and what does it mean through the lens of a developmental?
Mari Clements: Yeah. No, I think that it's very clear that people were made for relationship. Part of the impetus around this idea of attachment and this idea of understanding relationships in early infancy was birthed out of this tragic finding of all these war infants who were in orphanages, where their needs were being taken care of. They had shelter, they had food, they had clothing. All of that was fine. And some of them were losing weight anyway. And some of them would even die.
Evan Rosa: Which war was this?
Mari Clements: Oh, back in the Great War because that's where this research began, particularly World War II, but some of it even earlier than that. These infants had everything they needed to survive in terms of physical things, but they were wasting away because they weren't having the human contact. They weren't having the interaction. They weren't having warmth and affection and love.
I think humans were created for relationship, and I think that is part of the way in which we are created in the image of God and when we think about God as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and the relation among the Trinity being a very important piece of our understanding of God.
And then furthermore, the image of God sending his Son to be our salvation, to be our example, to be on the earth and to be in relationship, serious relationship with both his twelve disciples intensely, and then the broader circle of the people who followed and even in larger sort of settings when he was preaching something very relational.
The Sermon on the Mount is all about relationship. It's all about how do we treat each other? How do we behave in the world? Who are we called to be? And there's so much about how is it that we interact with others and what are we supposed to be doing? And I believe that is about bearing the image of God. Am I doing what Jesus would have me do in this situation? And I think that there are ways and times in which it's really easy to be selfish and it's really easy to be thinking about not what would Jesus do, but what does Mari want to do, right? And so I think we are, as Christians, called to think about what does it mean to be able to bear one another's burdens to be able to fulfill the law of Christ in this way?
Evan Rosa: What is psychology delivering to us that is indicating the most basic components of stewarding a good, healthy relationship?
Mari Clements: Well, to borrow Wheaton's slogan, "all truth is God's truth," right? So I think it is the case that developmental psychology tells us things in different ways and with different approaches that are in fact truth claims that we can find in the Bible, right?
So now, to borrow from Jesus. I think that the second commandment is a really important one: to love your neighbor as yourself. And what does that mean in a parent-child relationship? What does that mean in a marital relationship? I think I certainly can look at, "Tom said I've failed as a wife, Tom said I failed as a mother" and think, "oh, yeah, no, that was not loving that person as I would want to be treated. That's not treating them as I would want to be treating. That's not loving them as I would want to be loved."
And I think at our best we are able to do that kind of thing, that we are able to really have compassion for, to have love for, to be able to really prioritize that person's needs, not to the exclusion of our own, because I think that's another way in which people can go wrong, if you will. And I think there are a couple of problems with that. One of them is I don't think that was really what we were called to do. One of my colleagues here at Fuller is fond of saying that Christians are to be sacrificial, but they were not called to doormats, right? Turning the other cheek does not mean going and looking for the Roman soldier and saying, "here, slap me," right? The other thing that I think is important is what are you teaching your children in that?
So I've seen some really tragic situations and this specific example coming to mind: a husband who treated his wife, not as Christ would treat the church, not loving her, not sacrificing for her, but rather treating her as very, very secondary as her needs, her wants, her desires were not important, and she existed to serve him. And as their children grew and reached adolescence, their sons started treating their mom the same way. And you can imagine, play that out, what that means for how their son parents, and will treat their own romantic partners, their own wives in the future. And so this difficulty will be perpetuated across generation, and I don't think that's what we're called to do.
When you look at the passages in Paul's letters, you can often focus on one piece of it or another, but one of the things that I like to think about is, in fact, being called to love your wife as Christ loved the church. That's a lot of work. That's a really big responsibility, a really important thing to do.
Evan Rosa: One thing that I find very fascinating, you're talking about exemplarity, right, of Christ to the individual Christian. There's a really haunting and sobering kind of exemplarity that you said between that father and that son mistreating that woman. So that's an interesting thing that goes on, in ways to say things like "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree" and stuff like that, but that's all going on probably while at the same time, at a more conscious level, perhaps just at the level of belief and doctrine and conversation, we're talking about respect, we are saying that we believe in the second commandment and we're talking about loving each other and being a good family and morals and all that. But still we can transfer through action and through other means through example.
Mari Clements: Yeah. And sometimes we need to transfer those messages and sometimes we would be surprised at what we're transferring in those messages.
There are a couple of things that immediately pop to mind. One of them is a historic study, and so that was a study that was actually conducted with monkeys, not with people. And so the basic setup was that the monkeys could get the nutrition that they needed from one of two surrogate parents. One of them was made out of wire and one of them was a soft and cuddly one, and they deliberately set it up so that half of the monkeys had the nutrition from the wire monkey, and half of them had it from the soft and cuddly monkey, but both of them had that kind of monkey, —and, the surrogate monkey—in the cage.
Evan Rosa: And the Y monkey's like all hard and...
Mari Clements: Yeah. It's like a skeleton, basically. Yeah. It's really not at all cuddly. Not at all inviting. And what they found—Harlow was the major investigator here, and this was a study conducted in the first half of the 20th century—and what they found was that the monkeys who had the wire nutrition provider would go to that monkey when they were hungry, but then would gravitate back to the soft and cuddly one, even though it wasn't giving them anything. It's inanimate. It's just a soft and cuddly monkey, right? There's no food, there's no warmth, there's no whatever, but it's soft, right? And then the monkeys who had the soft and cuddly monkey providing the food, they didn't have the same relationship with the wire monkey. They basically ignored the wire monkey and hung out with the soft and cuddly monkey the whole time.
The other phase of that project was having only the wire monkey available, and oh my goodness, those poor monkeys. They came out so socially stunted. Monkeys are in fact social beings, right? So when those monkeys were introduced back to other monkeys, they were completely unable to interact and integrate with the other monkeys. They did not play well with others. Yeah. The monkeys who had the soft and cuddly monkey, they had some problems because they hadn't been socialized. You know, that monkey mom is not going to correct the baby's behavior. And if you watch monkeys with their offspring, they do in fact correct and teach their children and give them feedback. So they didn't have that. So they were a little bit worse than other monkeys, but they weren't nearly as bad as the monkeys who only had the wire monkeys.
The monkeys who only had the wire monkeys, they were completely rejected by the other monkeys. And the monkeys who had the soft and cuddly ones: they were more reserved and more timid in their interactions, but they were actually able to interact.
The other fascinating thing about that study is that once the monkeys had had the surrogate monkeys for 90 days, they were done. The effects didn't change. They didn't recover. If they were with their surrogate monkey for less than 90 days, they were able to reintegrate into the group of monkeys and eventually come up to the level of others. But more than 90 days, it was permanently stunted.
Evan Rosa: So that glue set after 90 days.
Mari Clements: Yeah. And the reason this matters for people is it looks like there are similar sort of sensitive periods for people as well, and those are important developmental transitions. So for attachment, for instance, for developing the first close emotional bond, it looks like for most children, that really needs to happen in the first year, but certainly by year three. And after that, if that close emotional bond hasn't been established, they're going to be continuing problems in relationships. They may be able to ameliorate those, but that first relationship in that early critical period is super important.
There are other really important transitions in a child's life that need to be paid attention to too. So for instance, my favorite age is four-year-olds because that's when children are transitioning from being primarily regulated by their parents in terms of their behavior and emotion to taking on their own self-regulatory skills. So really learning to regulate their own emotion, being able to self-sooth better, being able to have more control that's not parent related. So that's a brilliant time.
And then of course, when children are transitioning to school is another very important time, when children are transitioning to their own romantic relationships—really critical time. And it's really interesting. Our definition of adulthood has varied across cultures and across time. So right now, for instance, we think about "is adulthood 18, is it 21?" Well, now there's some suggestion that, given changes in American culture, that the emerging adulthood period is actually extending much longer, having a much longer tail, up to, for instance, maybe 30, in some cases.
Evan Rosa: So I wanted to talk a little bit about this because I think this is, again, that evidence of not just relationality, but a particular level of relationality. The glue's going to set. You only have so much time.
Mari Clements: We used to believe really stupid things about babies. We used to believe they couldn't see for a long time, that they weren't responsive, that they didn't know things, that they had very limited capabilities. And it's true. A baby is not going to do calculus, right?
But a baby, even from birth, it recognizes his or her mother's voice, and are more comforted by that. They recognize and respond to faces much more than random geometric shapes or figures. There are all kinds of things that babies can do, and one of the striking pieces was this still face experiment where they were really trying to look at how is it that infants interact early on?
And so what the paradigm was, was they had the baby sitting in the little car seat and the mom is in front of them, and at first they're interacting normally and they're playing and everything's fun. And then the experimenter prompts the mom to become completely unresponsive and to just have a completely still face. This was hard for mom and baby because the baby first is like, "oh, is this part of the game? Hi mom!" Obviously not saying that, but, you know, laughing, cooing, giggling, pointing, doing all the things that they had been doing together, trying to get mom's attention around a toy or what have you. And mom continues to be non-responsive and you can read the baby's face. They're puzzled. "What's happening?" And then they start to become distressed and would typically cry and would sometimes even get a little floppy because they're like, "what's going on?"
The first regulation that an infant gets is control of their own temperature, right? So there's some biostatic sorts of regulation that happens. So that's why a newborn has to be wrapped up really, really tightly. But very quickly on, they learn to be able to regulate their own temperature and they learn to be able to regulate their movements. You see that very quickly developing. But this load, this emotional load of mom not responding made them be floppy.
And what typically happened in that experiment is after a while, the baby just looks away because they can't stand looking at their mom, who has been so responsive, who has been, you know: "this is the person I can count on to be engaged with me. This is the person who loves me, whatever. Mom's not responding." And so typically the baby would eventually just look away and cry, ball, be visibly distressed.
Of course, when the experiment stops, mom's able to comfort the baby and is back and repair that emotional breach. So this really striking, striking, striking set of experiment just really shows that babies are really, from very, very young, are very attuned to social interaction, that they actually really care about and thrive on them.
Evan Rosa: I wanted to wrap up by asking your thoughts about this. So a little bit back to the Imago Dei. I'm curious what you think broadly about an intellectualist's perspective on the image of God, which says that the image of God is our cognitive ability, it's our intellect, it's reason and logic as opposed to the image of God as relationality.
And a test case here being that, in many cases, the severely disabled are these beautiful representations of loving relationality. What do you make of that?
Mari Clements: Many things. There have been various movements throughout history in terms of prioritizing this above that or dichotomizing and saying, "so it needs to either be intellect and reason or emotionality" and pressing one down. It needs to either be cognitive or embodied. And so, one or the other.
And I think that's selling God and people short. So I think that there is no single human being that will embody the nature of God. Obviously Jesus did, but none of the rest of us can ever do that. And so there may be an individual who is embodying or who is exemplifying one dimension of God better than other dimensions, but we don't get the full picture unless we can embrace and understand all of humanity in all of its expressions.
And I think you're right that there are incredible things that those of us who don't suffer from intellectual deficiencies can learn from and should learn from those who do. And we shortchange them and ourselves if we don't try and do that.
Evan Rosa: Yeah. I want a final word in support of the very concept of bringing psychology into the service of theology. What would you say to motivate that?
Mari Clements: Yeah. Well, I've heard lots of people who feel very deeply and passionately that God made our spirits, our minds, our souls, and thus he can heal them and we don't need help from others. And to that, I would say God made our bodies too, but if you have cancer or a broken arm, you go to a doctor, right? You don't just pray for healing. You should pray for healing. Absolutely, no question. In both circumstances. But I believe that God gave us intellect, as we just talked about. God gave us the ability to learn and to understand. And using tools that are available to us is, I think, a reasonable thing to do; something that in fact honors both our desire to flourish and to reflect God in our work in all ways. So getting that is a really important thing. That's the pragmatic piece.
The other piece, though, that I would say is that just as no individual reflects the full image of God, no science approach or discipline fully reflects the image of God, with apologies to all my theologian friends. Just because they're asking a particular set of questions and the questions that psychologists are asking, there are of course places of interface, but there are also things that psychologists, because of what their training is, because of what they're looking at, can answer better than theologians. There's certainly things that theologians can answer better than psychologists, and I think that we need both of those things if we want to think about the metaphor of the church as the body. And so not everybody's a hand, not everybody's an eye, not everybody's an ear, but we need all those things. I think that it is the case that God has given us various different callings and various different inclinations and various different curiosities.
And my curiosity is about how people work and how they think about things and how do we resolve conflict and how do we solve problems? And I think that that was a God-given inclination, and it's one that I think falls very centrally in the discipline of psychology. And so being able to think and use and put all of those things together from various different disciplines, I think is sacred responsibility.
Evan Rosa: Thank you so much, Mari.
Mari Clements: Absolutely.
Evan Rosa: For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture at Yale Divinity School. This episode featured psychologist Mary Clements. Production assistance by Macie Bridge and Kaylen Yun. Special thanks to Justin Barrett and our friends at Blueprint1543 for making this series possible.
I'm Evan Rosa and I edited and produced the show. For more information, visit us online at faith.yale.edu where you can find past episodes, articles, books, downloads, other educational resources that help people envision and pursue lives worthy of our humanity.
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