116 – Minding and Mental Fight

Editorial: Minding and Mental Fight

This year SOF’s annual conference in July is entitled Out of our Minds. With that in mind, the theme for this June Sofia is Minding and Mental Fight. The articles broach this theme from various perspectives.

First Pope Francis, who has inherited the Petrine injunction: ‘Mind my sheep.’ In his review of Don Cupitt’s latest (50th) book Creative Faith, Hugh Dawes notes that Don’s ‘second new travelling companion turns out to be Pope Francis…like so many other people Cupitt has been quite bowled over by the figure of this human Pope.’ In our first article Frank Regan, the recently retired, long-serving editor of Renew, the magazine of Catholics for a Changing Church, asks Can Pope Francis Change the Catholic Church? This pope minds about the scandals and corruption and most of all he minds about kindness, but can he change the Church and if so how much?

Next we have Bobbie Stephens-Wright, a one-time spiritualist now confirmed secularist, discussing the feud between two mind doctors, Freud and Jung. Their quarrel was about what Freud called ‘the black tide of the occult’, for which Jung had a ‘personal fascination’.

In these two ‘mental fights’ it is interesting that the religious battle of Pope Francis is about kindness, minding about the poor, the drowned migrants, those excluded or marginalised in the church, such as the divorced and homosexuals. It is a fight about ethics rather than theology. Neither Pope Francis nor the Roman Curia are disputing the existence of a personal God or even devil. It is the battle between Freud and Jung in the secular discipline of psychology that is a conflict about whether the supernatural realm exists or not.

Next Stephen Williams reflects on Mark’s account of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. He asks us to bear in mind that the figures in the story ‘were living in their own present’ and the story should ‘be treated seriously as the kind of things that happen in real life and it’s down to the protagonists, and to us reading the stories centuries later, to make what sense we can of them.’

In his article Madness and Making Sense, Phil Kershner asks ‘Why the Cross?’ What sense, if any, can we make of mindless violence, of the madness of Auschwitz, of crucifixion, of the wanton killing of the innocent?

Other articles and reviews pick up the theme of Minding and Mental Fight in their own way. For example in her review of Gail Hornstein’s Agnes’s Jacket: A Psychologist’s Search for the Meanings of Madness, Helen Barrett discusses Hornstein’s approach to people who hear voices. Rather than suppressing these ‘crazy’ voices with drugs, she favours listening to them to try and hear what they are telling the person. She regards these voices as neither unnatural nor supernatural but does think they should be taken as seriously as when in ‘pre-enlightenment’ times they were regarded as demonic possession.

Finally, two reminders: details about the SOF annual conference — Out of our Minds: What Can We Offer for a Healthier World? — can be found at www.sofn.org.uk. The conference takes place in Leicester from 23rd–25th July 2015. There is also a SoFiC (Sea of Faith in the Churches) Day Conference taking place in London on 10th October 2015.

Dinah Livingstone