Adam Shields

When Religion Hurts You: Healing from Religious Trauma and the Impact of High-Control Religion by Laura Anderson

July 29, 2025December 23, 2023 by Adam Shields

There is a report about Laura Anderson’s ethics violations as a therapist that I think is worth paying attention to.

Summary: High-control religious communities can create harm, but there are ways to move toward health

Harm from religious communities and individuals is not a new concept. However, recent increased attention to sexual abuse within the Protestant church and earlier public Catholic cases has drawn attention to the ways that church government and church systems can foster abuse of all sorts. Laura Anderson is primarily writing to help people recover from high-control religious communities, but there are principles here that are broader than that.

Anderson is not avoiding the term trauma (it is in the subtitle), but she is also trying to suggest that there are different levels of harm and that the response to that harm can be different. Two people can grow up and experience the same home, but one can be traumatized by practices that are not traumatizing to the other, even if the practices were applied to both. Part of the difficulty is that the word trauma has shifting meanings, so a more general “harm” can be helpful to apply to more than just legally documented abuse.

One of my takeaways from When Religion Hurts You is that high-control religious communities control as a means of protection and mission. There are evil people who are trying to control people and build their power for their own selfish purposes. But I think more often, people are attempting to help others and fulfill the church’s mission from their perspective. This happens by setting up boundaries to prevent harm, which becomes rigid rules that can themselves become harmful.

Christmas: The Season of Life and Light by Emily Hunter McGowin

December 23, 2023 by Adam Shields

Summary: Spiritual and theological reflections on Christmas and its traditions.

Emily Hunter McGowin’s Christmas is part of a series of books on the seasons of the liturgical calendar. Esau McAulley is the series editor and author of the book on Lent. The series also includes Tish Warren on Advent, Flemming Rutledge on Epiphany, and Emilio Alvarez on Pentecost.

Christmas is a nostalgic holiday and one that is relatively modern. It is not that the trope of Christmas being a pagan holiday is true (the book handles this well.) But our modern focus on gift giving and family and sentimentality is relatively recent. The Holy Post podcast recently had two episodes that talked about this. One was about St Nicholas, and the other was about David Taylor’s Christianity Today article on American Christmas. Taylor’s article is about how Christmas was not celebrated widely in the United States until the late 1800s. Congress met on Christmas when it fell on a weekday until the 1850s. Celebrating Christmas was against the law in Puritan New England from the mid-17th century because of its association with Catholicism and because of the history of how the celebration had been associated with debauchery in England.

But as Taylor points out, Queen Victoria and her German husband started using Christmas Trees to decorate and modeled a family-centered celebration of Christmas that was more common in Germany. A few years later, Charles Dickens published a Christmas Carol. And when it was published, few people would have had Christmas off of work. But the story’s popularity did shame employers into giving Christmas day off.

The Way of Discernment: Spiritual Practices for Decision Making by Elizabeth Liebert

January 4, 2024December 18, 2023 by Adam Shields

Summary: An exploration of spiritual practices that can facilitate decision-making.

Over the next several months I will do a reading projection around the concept, history, and teaching of Christian discernment. I picked up The Way of Discernment in part because one of the people I meet with for spiritual direction is processing through both individual and corporate discernment and it felt like a good time to do a personal deep dive.

I have some biases going into the idea of discernment that may change, but I want to say them out loud because they will likely keep influencing how I read going forward. First, I think discernment is a spiritual practice of seeking after God. Many people frame discernment as primarily about decision-making. And I fear that when the focus is the process and not the goal of seeking after God, we reduce what is a spiritual practice to a self-help checklist. Second, and related, developing discernment is about building character and virtue and orienting ourselves to rightly seeing God, not developing skills to interpret and decide or process information. Third, while I think there may be a “spiritual gift” of discernment, this is a general gift of the church, not limited to only a few. There are likely people who are better at discernment than others, but that doesn’t mean that discernment is only for the gifted. Fourth, the development of discernment is a part of the discipleship process. I started listening to a series of lectures on discernment by Timothy Gallagher, and he suggested that teaching about discernment was a third-level task. In this view, what comes first is to evangelize and introduce people to Jesus; then, once they have met Jesus, they need basic discipleship. Discernment was part of a more advanced discipleship work that requires people to be more intentional, introspective, and focused on their role in sanctification.

Bellwether: A Novel by Connie Willis

December 15, 2023 by Adam Shields

Summary: A satirically comic novel about scientists trying to understand the world around them.

I needed something different to read, an audiobook novel, preferably a funny one. I looked around in the Audible Plus Catalog (audiobooks free to members) and picked Bellwether mostly because I enjoyed the humor of the two previous novels I had read by Connie Willis (and that it was short).

Bellwether felt like a good Christopher Buckley novel. It was written in the mid-90s and feels like it was written in the mid-90s. Sandra Foster is a statistician who studies fads. Most fads have something that you can point to as the cause. New colors become popular because of a technological change in development (car colors, appliances, or ways to make LED lights that allow different colors.) But some fads become popular without an apparent cause. Sandra studies these unknown cause fads to understand how they start and how to stop those that are a problem. The central fad her research is focused on is the rise of the Bob haircut, which does not seem to be explainable through technology, media, or social events. A random wrong package delivery introduces Sandra to Bennett O’Reilly, a chaos theorist immune to fads. That eventually leads to them working together, and what the reader knows from the start will be a romance.

Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age by Richard Beck

December 13, 2023 by Adam Shields

Summary: A discussion of the problem of disenchantment in Christianity.

It has been several years since I have picked up one of Richard Beck’s books. I am a fan of his and would highly recommend the previous books I have read: Unclean (about hospitality), Slavery of Death (about the power of sin), Reviving Old Scratch (about the importance of the concept of evil) and Trains, Jesus and Johnny Cash (a gospel according to type of book).

Primarily, Hunting Magic Eels is about the problem of disenchantment in the modern world. There is an irony that we are disenchanted with Christianity, but not necessarily all enchantment (crystals, ghosts, etc.) He describes the problem well and in a way that others also have lamented. The traditional distant God as a watchmaker who created but is no longer needed or God in a two-story world (God exists but doesn’t interact except occasionally) is insufficient for historic Christianity.

Karl Rahner, in a famous sermon he preached in literal rubble at the end of the Second World War, has an even more famous quote: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or he will not exist at all.” I read that sermon on mysticism in a class. What Rahner meant there was mystic in the sense of enchantment. A disenchanted Christianity is a purely intellectual or moral system. But Christianity, while having intellectual and moral aspects, believes that God is real and is relational. A religious system that is only moral and/or intellectual has ceased to be Christian because it has removed the relational aspects from the faith. This is the positive sense of the quote, “Christianity is about a relationship, not a religion.”

The Black Tower by PD James (Adam Dalgliesh #5)

December 12, 2023 by Adam Shields

Summary: Dalgliesh, recovering from surgery and a misdiagnosis of cancer, Adam heads to the coast to visit a family friend only to find that he had recently died.

I have almost forced myself to pick up fiction this year. I am unsure why, but I have barely read any fiction. I have been slowly working through a collection of the first six books of the Adam Dalgliesh mystery series, which I purchased years ago. I don’t love the series yet, but the most well-known books of the series are still to come, so I have been continuing to read, hoping that the series will engage me like Inspector Gamache or others.

In this book, Adam Dalgliesh is not on duty as a homicide detective. Instead, he is on sick leave and planning to resign once he has recovered. Dalgliesh was the son of a pastor. When he was a child, he knew a pastor who had retired to be the chaplain at an estate where the owner was trying to create a community that could care for disabled people who did not need the full care of a nursing home but could not live independently.

Medieval Christianity: A New History by Kevin J. Madigan

December 11, 2023 by Adam Shields

Summary: Medieval Christianity is important to understand the development of Christianity, but also the development of Christianity is a result of both theology and social issues outside of the church.

I have been slowly working through Medieval Christianity for months. After reading Jesus Wars, I had questions about The Virgin Mary, which led me to pick up Medieval Christianity and Cultural Christians in the Early Church. As with any good history of Christianity, you realize that Christian history is not simply a history of people thinking big thoughts about Christ. It is also about a response to events and realities outside the church. Discussions about the role of the Pope in political affairs are not just theological but also have a relationship to tax rates, the need for armies, potential invasions from outside of Europe, the way reform movements frame their arguments, and how the technology of information transmission works.

One of my seminary classes was about the history of Christian thought, and the professor’s method was to talk about philosophical ideas, but he did not connect them to the history that helped to give rise to those ideas. As someone who likes to ground ideas in historical movements, I felt lost throughout the class because I did not feel like I had anything to connect those ideas to the context from which they arose.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by JK Rowling

December 6, 2023 by Adam Shields

Summary: I read it (a sixth time?) through my kids’ eyes, who were reading/listening for the first time.

I love reading books to my kids, a lot more than my kids love being read to. I didn’t write about it here, but I started Wrinkle in Time a couple months ago and my kids did not love it. They tolerated it until we got to IT being introduced, and that was just too much so we put it down. I might have tried to pick it up again, but my son’s teacher gave him a copy of Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire because she thought he might like it. He loved the idea of reading such a big book. He may have read it independently, but he does not tend to have that much reading stamina. I had read them the series’ first three books, and we had already given up on Wrinkle in Time because it was too scary. But I had not previously read Goblet of Fire because I suspected it might be too scary for them. So I was not really sure if we would make it through.

I talked about it with them, and they were willing to try. I like to keep the book moving and listen to the audiobook in the car. We started with the Stephen Fry audiobook version, but I have that on a bootleg MP3 file that is impossible to find your place on. So we gave up on that one about 1/3 of the way through and moved to the Jim Dale version when my wife drove the kids on a trip without me. I continued to read out loud here and there, but by the time we were about 2/3 of the way through, it had become mostly an audiobook.

Practicing Christian Doctrine by Beth Felker Jones

December 5, 2023 by Adam Shields

Summary: Well-written intro to theology text.

I picked up Practicing Christian Doctrine because I had an audiobook credit that had to be used before it expired, and I remembered a good podcast interview with Beth Felker Jones and decided to see what else she had written. All of that is to say I was not looking for a theology textbook; I was looking for a book by Jones, and the one I found happened to be an Intro to Theology textbook.

My last seminary theology class was more than 25 years ago. I read Erickson for my undergrad systematic theology class. My seminary systematic theology class was with Dwight Hopkins, and we read Reinhold Neibhur, Delores S. Williams, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and I think James Cone (or I read James Cone on my own at the time, I can’t remember), among some others. Hopkins’ class was focused on reading theologians not summary textbooks. I wish I could take that class again because I would get a lot more out of it now than I did. I remember at the time learning about a lot of perspectives in theology that I had not been exposed to. But I also remember thinking that I was glad I had had an undergrad course in systematic theology because I needed that grounding to understand what the authors we were reading were responding to.

Practicing Christian Doctrine is exactly the type of systematic theology book I would recommend to someone who does not have a seminary background but is interested. I listened to it as an audiobook, which is probably not ideal for this type of book, but it was ideal for me. There are several things that I really liked about it. First, Jones cited widely throughout history and around the world. She also included a note about when and where the author being cited was from. That is a very small feature, but it really helped to note that background matters in how a person approaches theology.

Seeking Wisdom: Spiritual Direction and the Moral Life by Rev. Dennis J. Billy

December 4, 2023 by Adam Shields

Summary: A series of lectures about spiritual direction from the perspective of St. Alphonsus de Liguori, who emphasized the moral life and prayer and was particularly interested in expanding spiritual direction to the laity and the urban poor in 18th century Naples.

I like to keep one book in my current reading (or listening) stack directly on spiritual direction. This keeps me thinking about my practice of spiritual direction and exploring new dimensions or deepening my practice as a spiritual director. Seeking Wisdom: Spiritual Direction and the Moral Life by Rev. Dennis J. Billy was a complete unknown. I did not know anything about St Alphonsus, and there were no reviews on the lectures. But because I have almost entirely read about spiritual direction out of the Ignatian or Benedictine tradition, I picked it up. These are 22 roughly fifteen-minute lectures. Mostly I listened to them while walking my dog over a period of about two months.

The main weakness of the lectures is that they do not have a clear target audience. The early lectures are very basic introductions to spiritual direction, which is helpful for people who are new. But those with a background will be bored for the book’s first quarter (I nearly gave up at this point.) Then, the last three-quarters of the lectures will be interesting for those with a spiritual direction background, but those new to spiritual direction, especially those not Catholic, will be lost.

Those who are Protestant without much background in Catholicism can learn here, but terminology and theological orientation may be hard to overcome. Two minor examples: earlier in the book, the lecturer talks about taking on a Christological focus on spiritual direction, which means something slightly different in a protestant world. In his perspective, this is about becoming like Christ to others, which many Protestants may resist as a viable perspective. Another example is the medieval understanding of spiritual formation, which has three stages: the purgative, the illuminative, and the unitive. This language is very common in Catholic presentations of spiritual formation but almost completely absent from Protestant understandings of spiritual formation.