Geoffrey W. Sutton PhD, Psychology and Culture

  Religious Music 2023 by Geoffrey Sutton and Bing Does religious music influence wellbeing? Music, Religious Identity, and Wellbeing   Renate Ysseldyk and others examined responses of Christians and Atheists to religious music. Previous studies found a positive link between listening to music and both memory and wellbeing. But the authors wondered if religious identity would make a difference. Psychologists find that our identities are bound up with our sense of our social groups. If the groups we identify with are threatened, then many of us experience negative effects such as a negative mood and even impaired memory needed for learning. The study There were 188 women and 72 men between the ages of 16 and 56 in this study. Their religious identity was used to form two religious groups: Christian and Atheist. The researchers presented them with one of four types of music, which created four music groups: Christian hymn Buddhist chant Classical No music con...

  Oral Roberts University/Google images On a hot and humid 1950s Sunday afternoon, I sat amongst the crowd of white-shirted, perspiration-soaked men and paper-fan waving Sunday-hat-covered women at a tent crusade in Southeastern Pennsylvania. After preaching salvation, the dark suit jacket came off. Holy hands touched one after another. I watched a line of broken people approach a healing stage and leave with a testimony. Everywhere, white and black hands reached upward as organ tones bolstered songs of praise. (Sutton, 2021, p. 79)   As I was writing Counseling and Psychotherapy with Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians , I was struck by the transitional figure of Oral Roberts who blended faith healing and a nascent Pentecostal theology, which eventually led to a grand attempt to integrate medical science and faith.   Oral Roberts   Oral Roberts was born 24 January 1918. The next month, four waves of a flu pandemic killed off about as many as died i...

In Christian texts, people may be possessed by demons. When possessed they act in ways that scare others and cause harm. The demons speak to other humans. And in response to Jesus Christ, or the apostles, the demons may be “cast out” of a person. In contemporary Christianity, the “casting out” has been known as deliverance or exorcism. Some groups believe that a place may be possessed by evil spirits thus, deliverance or exorcism may apply to both people and places. In general, protestant Christians use the term deliverance and Catholics use the term exorcism and follow a particular process (a rite) of exorcism. The term possessionists has been used to refer to people who believe in the phenomenon of people possessed by evil spirits even if they are not possessed ( Giordan & Possamai, 2016 ). About Devils and Demons A 2016 Gallup poll report indicated that 89% of Americans believe in God, but this is lowered by 10% if given the option that they are not s...

The correlation between church attendance and good health is a strong relationship.  Put simply, people who attend church on a regular basis also have better health than do people who do not attend church on a regular basis. So, what’s my issue? It’s the old problem that never goes away-- correlations do not mean causation. The fact that people who attend church have better health than those who don’t, does not mean attending church caused better health. The RNS writer, Yonat Shimron , does not emphasize this important fact about correlations. Here’s a quote from the first sentence of the story: “(RNS) The latest in a long line of studies, now numbering in the hundreds, if not thousands, shows that church attendance is good for your health. ” Later in the article, the author refers to various factors connected with church attendance that might be responsible for the supposed effect. It is good to consider various possibilities like prayer, social interac...