In this two-part blog post, I (Paul Kim) am excited to feature insights from my colleagues Katie Douglass (practical theologian) and Brittany Tausen (social psychologist) about their co-authored book, Love Your Neighbor: How Psychology Can Enliven Faith and Transform Community. This book explores how to love others better through the lens of both psychology and theology. Think Bible Study meets your favorite psychology class – all in the service of a shared mission to live more faithfully. In the book, Douglass and Tausen illuminate the psychological barriers to neighbor love as well as psychological and spiritual practices that can help us to overcome the circumstances, thoughts, and feelings that get in the way of our desire to be good neighbors. Through engaging stories and evidence-based insights, they reveal why human connection often falters—and provide actionable strategies to overcome these barriers.
Paul Kim (PK): If a student were to ask you for one takeaway from your book, how might you respond (after encouraging them to read the entire book, of course)?
Brittany Tausen (BT): For me, there are two key takeaways from the book: 1) there are many resonant truths across psychology and theology, and 2) psychology can actually help you to be a better Christian – making it easier for you to do what you are called to do – love your neighbors.
Katie Douglass (KD): I would encourage students to be open to the ways that God can use scientific insight to help them live more faithfully. I believe God is the source of all truth, and one place we find that truth is in the psychological sciences.
PK: In reading your book, I was struck by how purposeful you were in incorporating pedagogical tools designed to deepen your students’ love of their neighbor. Even more impressive, you have empirical and/or theoretical backing for these tools! Could you provide one example of what you might do with students in class, and what kind of theoretical or empirical evidence underlies the activity?
KD: One way I have helped students understand measures of dehumanization is to have them stand up and walk to one side of the room or the other. One side represents how cold and like a robot someone is, and the other side represents how much someone is warm and caring someone is. Then I have them stand closer to one wall or the other based on how much they think the people I name are more like a robot or a warm and caring person. I start with accountants (almost all stand near the robot wall), then teachers, then nurses, then people serving in the military, then people experiencing homelessness. Then I ask them to rate themselves. Then I ask how Jesus would rank these people, and I tell them that I think Jesus would see all of these people as warm and caring, capable of loving relationships. I think it shows them how easily and quickly we categorize people into dehumanizing stereotypes.
BT: A prominent psychological barrier that gets in the way of us loving others better is the confirmation bias – a tendency to seek out and remember information that confirms what we already believe to be true. It takes a lot of intentionality, openness, and courage to actively seek out information that is counter to our already held beliefs or preconceived notions. In my classrooms, I give my students opportunities to practice countering the confirmation bias by having them intentionally look up “good reasons to believe…” something that is different or inconsistent with their own beliefs. If we are in an election year, that might mean researching good reasons to vote for the candidate they don’t intend to vote for. In other years, it might be about a specific issue they feel passionate about. The goal is not to change their minds, but to help them develop a curiosity about and a deeper understanding of other perspectives.
PK: I have often found that students think of loving others as an individualistic endeavor. How might we encourage students to think differently about what it means to love our neighbors, so that factors beyond the individual are also considered? (for example, you write that it is not enough to simply want to love others; we must set up our lives in a way that makes it conducive to such love).
BT: In the book, we talk a lot about time as a critical factor for neighbor love. When people are rushing around from point A to point B, schedules packed to the brim, they are unlikely to notice, let alone help those around them in need. On an individual level, we might read this and think, “I need to build more time and space into my schedule if I want to love others better”, and that is true. But this work also calls us to examine our family, community, and broader cultural narratives about time. Do we think of time as money, a resource, a gift? The way we think and talk about time can shape the way we use it and what (or who) it is used for. This work has helped me to reevaluate not only how I spend my own time, but also the narratives I buy into mindlessly, as well as the expectations I’m explicitly or implicitly placing on others about how their time is used. What “culture of time” am I promoting in my day-to-day life – one that centers people, or one that centers productivity? What one is more closely aligned with how Jesus spent His time?
KD: My favorite way to have students think about this is to draw a map of their day and begin counting how many people they encounter. These maps include communities they are a part of, like a team they are on, their classes at school, the place they work, and the place they live. We can interact in these spaces in ways that inhibit connection by wearing earbuds or keeping our eyes on our phones, or we can intentionally connect with our communities by listening to and seeing one another. It’s almost too simple; however, I think most of us have not brought our phones and earbuds to a conscious level for critical evaluation. These devices are a barrier to connection, and they prevent opportunities to love others. My hope is that awareness of these devices as barriers to connection can help students critically evaluate the way they move through their day and their openness to potential neighborly connections.
PK: I was moved by how you model vulnerability in your book. You share some honest stories about yourselves, including when you have failed to love others well. What is it like to share these stories, and how do readers (including student readers) respond to them?
KD: Before I shared any of the stories in the book, I checked with the people who are in them. Their names are not listed, and they are anonymous, but even so, these are people I care about and want to have relationships with. I hope that these vulnerable stories actually help people feel their way into insights about themselves. The people who have read the book have shared that the stories we tell are some of the most memorable parts of the book for them, and I hope that is true for all of our readers.
BT: Writing a book called “Love Your Neighbor” felt vulnerable from the start, as there is no piece of me that feels like I have this “figured out.” I hope that the stories we share are humanizing and help the reader see that we are also fumbling through trying to love others better. Some days we do that better than others. There was honestly never a moment in writing and editing the book that I didn’t feel convicted by what we wrote, and I think that is a good sign. If I need these reminders and tools and can learn from them anew despite knowing and teaching them for years, then maybe that means other people need them and will benefit from them too. I sure hope so.
Editor’s Note: Part II will appear tomorrow.
