Christian Psychology in light of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings

One of the great strengths of a Christian approach to psychology is that it is less prone to be constrained to the discourse of the modern psychological sciences, which lean toward the reductive and sterile, or as is fittingly named—the clinical.  It’s not that the modern discourse of the psychological sciences is wholly bad or unhelpful, but simply that it is limited and incomplete on its own.  As Christian psychologists, we need to be turning toward the plethora of wisdom made available to us—the ancient and the modern, the philosophical and the theological, the scientific and the literary.  Perhaps one of the most overlooked treasures for a robust Christian psychology is the good novel—one that stirs the imagination.  As persons invested in the psychological sciences, we fear fiction because it is not scientific, and as Christians we fear it because it often engages the non-rational aspects of who we are—sides of ourselves that we have grown suspicious of, especially following the Age of Reason.