Category: Uncategorized

BY: Dr. Keith Dow | April 17, 2025

This post first appeared on the Cross-Training Blog, and you can find it here.

I never anticipated researching disability while traveling with an injury. Yet, as fate (or God) would have it, on November 15th, I got tangled up with someone in front of the net during a hockey game. I ended up spraining my MCL and pinching my meniscus in my right knee – a bona fide Canadian Injury™. Later that month, I embarked on a journey across Ontario to interview 11 Christian adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) for my cross-training fellowship research project.

To put Ontario’s size into perspective, it’s larger than any European country except Russia. While I didn’t travel up North, it was still a lot of driving!

Even with a brace on my knee, I struggled to haul my Bristol board and art supplies into a church building in Wainfleet that lacked automatic doors. I battled my way up flights of stairs in Hamilton, waiting for assistance to open the doors. Caught in a snowstorm in Orillia, I cautiously avoided icy patches as I tried to clean off my vehicle.

There’s no need to call me a hero, even if my story is indisputably heroic. 😊 Seriously, though, my minor impairment was more uncomfortable and annoying than truly disabling. It gave me a better understanding of the countless barriers people with mobility disabilities face in accessing church buildings and community spaces every day. It also served as a fitting metaphor for the monumental challenges many folks with IDD encounter before they can contribute to theological or psychological research.

It’s for this reason that my research project focuses on a couple of areas. a.) How might we reduce barriers to psychological and theological research for people with IDD and b.) How do people with IDD conceive of and think about God and themselves? Both questions required me to engage a range of creative approaches to maximize accessibility and get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. Photovoice is one approach that has been shown to work well for many people. Before we met, participants took photos that reminded them of God, often with the help of a support person or family member.

Some photovoice journal entries were short and scrawled in participants’ own handwriting, while others were written collaboratively with a support person. I provided printable Word files and electronic PDFs, but one participant called me, apologizing profusely: “I’m sorry, but I don’t think this is going to work for me. Is there any chance I could send a voice message?” I was happy to reassure them that hearing this kind of feedback was precisely what I needed to learn how to conduct research effectively and pass on those lessons to others. Modern technology makes transcribing voice messages easy and free, and with just a couple of edits, they faithfully captured not only this person’s words but also the way they communicated.

In person, a creative, arts-based approach helped mitigate some of the challenges of overly theoretical or academic survey-based research, while semi-structured interview questions helped me assess participants’ understanding of the topics.

Despite surveyors’ best intentions, how many of us have struggled to understand and answer a question when all we’re given are a few words on a page?

Now imagine complexifying this with minds that take everything literally upon first impression or with those who comprehend concepts best at a second- or third-grade reading level. During our initial information sessions, I asked participants if they knew what “theology” meant. Eight out of eleven were unsure, even if some had heard the word before. That’s fair—after all, theologians are likely to give as many different answers as there are theologians!

I gave participants the option to remain anonymous or to be named collaborators on this project. Whether contributing art or theological insights, it’s important that people have the option to be recognized for the gifts they share. Every one of the 11 participants chose to be named collaborators, and rightfully so.

On February 2nd, all of our work came together. Many participants attended the Art & Vespers service at Martin Luther University College (Waterloo, ON) to kick off the Images of God exhibition, which runs until April 30, 2025. It was a moving service held in a beautiful chapel, with large poster representations of each participant’s collages displayed around the room. Beneath each collage were photos they had taken that reminded them of God, along with their insights, either from their journals or our conversations.

You can read more about the project and process in a Martin Luther University College write-up or about the Art & Vespers Service in a Karis article. This work was also featured in Canada’s premier Christian magazine, Faith Today.

In the coming months, I’ll be putting together a more thorough journal article highlighting the results for a special issue of the Journal of Psychology and Theology. I’m also looking forward to sharing more about this work at an upcoming mental health summit (May 20-22), a Canadian disability and ministry conference (May 24), the Institute of Theology and Disability (June 16-18), and the American Association of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (June 23-25). Wherever possible, I’ll aim to include my collaborators, several of whom eagerly await another speaking opportunity.

The fields of theology and psychology aren’t going to change overnight to better receive the contributions of people with IDD. In fact, the field of IDD itself has taken decades to move in this direction and still has much work to do. However, I’m confident that the contributions of the people I worked with speak for themselves. Any field that continues to marginalize or perpetuate barriers to people with IDD suffers as a result. Conversely, I hope this small project helps inspire churches, researchers, and communities to embrace the vital presence and contributions of people with disabilities in new and transformative ways.

The March/April 2025 edition of Faith Today magazine featured an overview of the Images of God project by Jaidyn Bremer. The interview took place prior to the Art & Vespers service (February 2, 2025). If you find their work and writing interesting, I highly recommend subscribing to the magazine!

BY: Dr. Keith Dow | August 20, 2024

This post first appeared on the Cross-Training Blog, and you can find it here.

This isn’t entirely unlike the relationship of psychology and theology. They’re close with their respective BFFs, science and religion, who are rumoured to have a long-standing feud. Although, when you ask people what happened to lead to this presumed in-fighting, no one can quite put their finger on why they’re at odds or what led up to this. Something about the Church – from whence most early scientists arose – silencing new theories out of fear of change, perhaps. Sounds like a large, established, institution problem. Something about scientists being hostile to religion, though many probably just have a healthy division of work and private life. After all, science can give us an (empirical) is but cannot give us an ought. Religion can give us an ought (in a meaning-making way) but lacks the tools to answer granular questions about biology, geology, or even psychology.

Psychology itself went through a period of disambiguation in the 1800’s, where it was given a distinct role, out from under the umbrella of theology or natural philosophy. Experimental psychologists such as Wilhelm Wundt defined it as being “between the natural sciences and the humanities” and, to the chagrin of many of his contemporaries, he declined to give it a religious or theological origin – despite, or perhaps because of, his own religious origin as the son of a Lutheran minister.[1]

This is where we might start to wonder if psychology has been working to distance itself from its religious, theological, or even philosophical origins. Maybe psychology and theology are more like child and parent in a dysfunctional family where neither chooses to identify the other as family?

We can look to the etymology of “psyche” for a clue that this might be the case. As Rev. Dr. Joanna Collicutt reminds us in a recent homily (around the 36:00 mark), “psyche” or “psuché” can be translated as “life,” “soul,” “human being,” but in contemporary psychology, it is too-often understood solely as “mind.” When Jesus says, “For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it,” it is to our psyche that he is referring as our life (Matthew 16:25, NIV). What was once the study of the soul became, largely, the study of the workings of the mind – a meaning that only fully came into common parlance early in the 20^th century.

In TheoPsych, Dr. Justin Barrett argues that modern psychology largely confines itself to a kind of methodological naturalism – “That is, for the sake of their inquiry, they assume that the only permitted explanations are naturalistic. The supernatural or spiritual are not typically entertained as part of explanatory or predictive accounts” (p. 136). From a methodological point of view, this attention to measurable phenomena is commendable and perhaps even necessary. We wouldn’t get far in understanding mental processes and mechanisms if every human action and response were explained by “it was probably the angels again” or, as is still too common in church pews when witnessing something strange or unfamiliar, “looks like demons at work!”

Yet, psychology has been left to roam the countryside with its inheritance for long enough. It’s time for it to come home. Not in the sense that psychology should abandon the distinctness of its approach and process, but it’s time for its historical and etymological amnesia to end. Methodological naturalism is one thing, but discounting the subjective, ethical, and epistemological teleology that undergirds psychological investigation is not viable or, ultimately, ethical. Spirituality and meaning-making form us each in innumerable ways, and being keenly aware of biases and presuppositions regarding health, the “greater good,” and the ends of psychological inquiry require robust conversations and thoughtful interactions with the fields of philosophy and theology. Neglecting these intersections does not result in value-free psychology; rather, it results in practices and approaches that are unaware of the values they import and perpetuate.

One way to begin this journey is to consider what kind of “health” or even “mental health” psychology is aimed at? We can struggle between over-pathologizing mental states and a kind of happy-go-lucky positive psychology, but what grounds or sets the intention for our view of health? More personally, what do I understand mental health to look like? Each of us carries our own interpretations, impressions, and biases into our work – from culture, religion, upbringing, education, or otherwise. We may situate ourselves in a particular lineage of thought, but we also bring our own experiences that influence our understanding.

As a Christian, I look to a word like “sózó” in the Greek New Testament to set the tone for healing. This is the word used in Mark 5 for the healing Jesus brought to a woman who had been bleeding for 12 years and the word used when he “healed” Jairus’ daughter from, well, deadness. It’s a word that encompasses “salvation” together with physical cure. Not dissimilar from “shalom” in the Hebrew Bible, it captures the way that health and wholeness are not to be found apart from community, but in a restoration of relationships – a kind of harmony with oneself, with one’s community, with one’s world, and with God.

I don’t expect that salvation itself will be discovered under a microscope or in a brain lab. I do expect that what we find there, or on the therapist’s proverbial couch, will be an indicator of the possibilities of a wider and more generous understanding of what restoration and transformation might look like for each person. Acknowledging that further dialogue and learning is needed between psychology and the humanities enables a religiously and culturally literate approach to the psychological sciences, one that not only works within the limits of the science but acknowledges and appreciates these limits – and our own limits as researchers – as we seek the health of our communities and our world.

As mentioned previously, psychological approaches that do not engage with philosophical or theological critique or contribution are at risk of being unaware of their own biases. This is, of course, a hazard of any endeavor. One such bias imported from modern Western culture is that of individualism – the sense that health or wholeness of mind is a personal project; that I am alone in my mental health journey. Of course, each approach or theory has its place for community and relationships – but, in practice, we may default to the “go it alone” mentality. In dialogue with philosophy and theology, psychological practice will be aided in its reflexive awareness, just as philosophical and theological inquiries are aided in their empirical grounding when in conversation with psychological investigation.

As I scroll through the projects listed on this website, and as I have gotten to know each of my fellow researchers as friends (not frenemies!), I am reminded that none of us needs to navigate these questions and concerns alone. We are all learning, we all have questions, and we all have something to contribute. I can breathe a sigh of relief at not needing to have all of the answers but knowing that I bring a piece of the puzzle to the table. I anticipate with hope upcoming “family reunions” with psychologists and theologians. As a theologian, I have experienced how stimulating and enriching these conversations can be. My tradition holds a core value of coming together as diverse community and working toward peace and restoration of relationships. We celebrate the “community hermeneutic.” This is a crucial aspect of mental health, a picture of sózó – needed more than ever in an age of polarization. I’m grateful to witness and, Lord willing, contribute to this healing work.

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[1]  Wundt: Logik, 1921, 4th ed., Volume 3, p. 51

I’m grateful to Ela, Peter, and Jahdiel for reading over and providing feedback to an earlier version of this blog post.