Isn’t Christianity Just Wish Fulfillment?

A lecture given at L’Abri Fellowship in Southborough, Massachusetts. For more information, visit https://southboroughlabri.org/

Feb 25

Dr. Brandon Unruh

"Isn't Christianity Just Wish Fulfillment?"

This talk examines competing understandings of our seemingly universal desire for transcendence and perfection as either a collective neurosis driven by unresolved infantile longings (famously argued by Sigmund Freud) or a trustworthy signpost hinting at ultimate spiritual reality (as C.S. Lewis posited in his "argument from desire"). Dr. Brandon Unruh will consider the strengths of and objections to each claim from his professional vantage point as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist while also describing four experiential pathways this desire may take across the course of our lives: (1) it may be wrongly deified and leave us dissatisfied, (2) it may lie dormant on account of deadening attachment experiences, (3) it may be devalued or demystified by naturalistic explanatory models, or (4) it may deliver us into a deeper relational experience of God as the source and object of this desire.

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