Love Your Neighbor: How Psychology Can Enliven Faith and Transform Community

Douglass (Cultivating Teen Faith) and Tausen, professors of theology and psychology, respectively, at Seattle Pacific University, team up for an energetic, research-based guide to “lov[ing] one another as Jesus loved us.” Unpacking what psychology reveals about human interaction, they explain how readers can harness the “proximity effect”—i.e., the idea that people are likelier to befriend those physically close to them—to bond with others by spending more time in public spaces, or taking public transit to work instead of driving (according to scripture, one’s neighbor is “anyone you cross paths with”). Elsewhere, they discuss how to fight dehumanization, a phenomenon wherein the failure to see others as possessing “the same value” as oneself makes it harder to appreciate their complexity. That, too, can be mitigated by personal interactions, especially those that happen on equal footing, since even benevolent acts like serving food at a homeless shelter, the authors note, cement a power imbalance that makes it harder to recognize the other’s full humanity. Fluidly translating psychological insights into accessible prose, the authors illuminate the challenges to human connection and offer well-grounded—if not especially surprising—strategies for surmounting them. It’s a refreshing primer on how to apply a religious dictum that’s easy to remember but hard to practice. (Jan.)