Assumed audience: Theologically-orthodox Christians, or folks interested in things that theologically-orthodox Christians think.
Out today at The Gospel Coalition is my review of John Andrew Bryant’s A Quiet Mind to Suffer With.
According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, about one in five Americans deals with some kind of mental illness, and about one in 20 Americans has a mental illness so severe that it seriously affects their lives. What Christians ought to make of this and how we ought to respond to the idea of “mental illness” in the first place have both been open points of debate for decades.
John Andrew Bryant’s theological memoir A Quiet Mind to Suffer With: Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Death of Christ doesn’t engage with those debates directly. Instead, Bryant — a writer and part-time street pastor — narrates his experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), including his time in a psych ward and his recovery from the worst of that OCD. He weaves his theological reflections throughout the narrative.
This was an incredibly challenging book to review: I agree with much of what Bryant affirms, profoundly dislike his prose, and have significant reservations about what he leaves out. Asked if I would recommend the book, my answer will vary enormously on a person by person basis.
I am reasonably happy with where we landed given the length constraints of reviews at TGC (aiming for 1,000 words!), but I think there is a lot more to be said about both this book specifically and the broader themes it touches on. The nearly thousand words we cut on Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and, more broadly, therapeutic understandings of sin and self are things I think are worth saying — somewhere, at some point! Likewise, what is a three-sentence note in this little review about how theological memoir works on the reader and in our culture at large deserves a much fuller expansion elsewhere.
But for today: the review!