Humanity Under Siege

Right.

It's interesting.

I'm sure I'll boil this back to a question at the end of a kind of comment.

But maybe I'll put it out up front.

You probably get from certain people in your field, especially, that aren't committed to kind of a faith vision, Christian vision, where there is more going on than meets the eye.

And even sometimes within the Christian world, it's kind of like the old saying, oh yeah, prayer, we tried that.

We need to now... find a solution.

So there is this suspiciousness.

And I think there is also, and I see this a lot in just the academic side of studying history of the church's thinking, is that there is often a time that even the early church was very naive in this, that when the Bible described these things, they were just a bunch of people.

They didn't have a good term for mental illness or something.

So they just described anything to demonic activity.

And really, the early church fathers were far more nuanced from that.

They did not have a monocausal understanding of that.

They looked for somatic influences bodily.

They recognized the demonic as real and there, but it was not really their first step.

It was really our kind of spiritual path.

dimension that can be open just to sin and distorting of our own self through the wrong use of our passions and loves that oftentimes are influenced by the demonic, but not by being possessed.

So they had a very

thick

way of understanding the human being, to which I think You'll see in the Orthodox tradition, it's still held.

And you'll also see figures in that tradition, like I think his name is Jean-Claude Larochette.

He's kind of a French Orthodox, but he wrote basically on this mental health and spiritual illness is the way he talks about it.

So just with the pushback you get, because they often get the same pushback, that that's this outmoded worldview that is just moving to the superstitious rather than the supernatural.

How have you had to deal with that?

Yeah, it's sort of multifaceted in the way I can respond to that, because I've found, depending on where the person's background of faith is or lack of faith, really determines kind of where they're approaching certain problems and situations.