Abstract
Few books in the field of pastoral theology can be described as magisterial, but Barbara J. McClure's Emotions approaches the definition. She interrogates a nearly 3,000-year-long history of understanding emotions from a wide variety of theories, beginning with the Greek philosophers—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, etc.—moving through early Christian theological perspectives, and ending with contemporary neuroscience. McClure then turns toward a perennial concern in the field of pastoral theology to examine and evaluate emotions’ effects on possibilities for flourishing.
McClure, Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology and Practice at Brite Divinity School, holds that pastoral theologians have taken for granted too much of what we think we know about emotions, often working on assumptions that may be unfounded. We are recipients of a long line of “mixed messages” about the role of emotions in human life that have contributed to our understanding of and confusion about emotion (xii). Thus, she introduces readers to the most significant research in the field of emotions through the disciplinary approaches of psychology, cultural anthropology, sociology, theology, neuroscience, and philosophy. The central thread running throughout the book is summed up in these questions: “What do emotions have to do with people's well-being, and what do scholars (both ancient and contemporary) have to teach us about these questions and their answers?” (10). While McClure intends this exceedingly readable and approachable book to be useful to a range of people doing emotion work—parents, teachers, therapists, etc., the content and craft of the book is oriented toward a more academic audience of theologians, ethicists, and pastoral practitioners.
Appreciatively learning from, yet arguing against, the cumulative perspectives that have led us to the dominant view of emotions as “entities that exist in particular parts of the brain” or in structures of a situation, waiting to be “triggered” by an event (125), McClure draws upon social constructionism and contemporary neuroscience to put forth a perspective on emotions and feelings as capacities generally embedded in our raw evolutionary makeup, yet constructed in their specificity within the particularity of contexts and situations. Not surprisingly for those familiar with McClure's earlier work (e.g., Moving Beyond Individualism in Pastoral Care and Counseling, Cambridge : Lutterworth Press, 2011), the social setting in which emotions are constructed—systems, institutions, and organizations—are central to the way McClure guides readers in attending to the subject. The “categories and concepts” we each learn about the world in our cultural milieu are foundational to how our emotional experiences develop. Yet she also maintains a place in emotional experience for the unconscious, which is often missing from constructionist perspectives.
The final chapter represents McClure's synthesized perspective on how she defines the slippery and unwieldy concern of “flourishing.” At times unwieldy itself, her definition of flourishing considers insights from a survey of thinkers from Plato to Augustine to Darwin to cognitive scientists, and results in a robust description of flourishing for contemporary pastoral theologians. Importantly, she foregrounds her commitment to the values of “care, nonviolence, justice, mutuality, and other virtues” in adjudicating the usefulness of an emotion in its contribution to either life-giving or life-limiting possibilities (186). This is a perspective on flourishing that challenges Western, neoliberal, and capitalist concerns for happiness and desire, often bound up in practices of individualism and consumption. McClure invites theologians and practitioners to assess the way emotions are worked upon in social and economic projects that limit growth, flourishing, and complexity, while also holding potential to promote interconnectedness, moving individuals and communities toward God's intention of “flourishing for every other life and all creation” (172).
No researcher in pastoral and practical theology addressing concerns of emotions will ignore this text, nor should we wish to. McClure has gifted readers not only with an erudite perspective on emotions in human flourishing, unique in our field's literature for its comprehensive nature, but she has also given readers over 140 pages of endnotes and citations that will point future researchers in myriad directions helpful to our own work. If there is a limitation to this text, it is that it leaves readers wanting further guidance from McClure in incorporating her theory on emotions’ role in flourishing into practices of care, counseling, ethics, ministry, and community development. Perhaps this will emerge in future work. Until then, it will be the reader's good work to construct praxis upon McClure's theoretical foundations.