"What Your Body Knows About God" author Q&A + GIVEAWAY!

I’m very excited to present a Q&A with Rob Moll about his new book, What Your Body Knows About God, in which he explores how current brain research uncovers our God-given need to connect deeply with each other and with God. The book weaves together both the intricacies of human physiology and personal experiences in an honest, approachable style. Rob is an editor-at-large with Christianity Today and serves World Vision as communications officer to the president. Rob, his wife Clarissa, and their four children live in the Seattle area. He also happens to be my childhood friend, and I have many fond memories of Wednesday night youth group hosted by his parents at their home. He’s generously and thoughtfully answered my many questions, so enjoy reading Rob’s responses below.

Emily: Who do you feel will benefit most from reading this book?

Rob: My main audience is Christians who want a deeper prayer life or those who are interested in the connection between science and faith. That's not really a demographic that you can identify with a pollster and target a book to, but I think a lot of Christians want a deeper connection to God through prayer. This book, I hope, is a fun and encouraging way to understand how we are designed for that kind of connection.

Emily: You did a boatload of research on brain chemistry and behavior, much of which you've featured in the first section of the book. Which studies' conclusions surprised you the most?

Rob: Reading Andrew Newberg's research on the brain and spirituality was key. One thing he found was that an area of the brain that is stimulated by prayer is also involved in social interaction. So people who pray can increase their sense of care for other people, their compassion. For me it was astounding to read this research that said loving God helps you to love your neighbor, which as Jesus said, are the two greatest commandments.

Emily: One of the most powerful chapters in your book for me was when you described Clarissa's crisis of health, which almost tipped you toward a crisis of faith in your thesis that God perfectly designed us to connect with him and other believers. What has helped most to restore your confidence?

Rob Moll, author of What Your Body Knows About God 
Photo by Alissa Clark

Rob: Learning how God has also designed us to respond to suffering. Yes, our bodies are often broken. As healthy as prayer and spirituality are, it isn't a magic formula for everything going perfectly. Things go wrong, and we are designed to respond to people's suffering. My favorite study was one that sought to determine which of two different treatments would best help MS suffers. It turned out that the MS suffers who provided the treatments were helped the most! Helping others, we help ourselves.

Emily: To rewire our brains for the better, you argue for regular, focused times of prayer. You've also shared your own habit of praying quietly as your children drift off to sleep. Do you have encouragement for other harried parents of young children who long to spend time with God, but struggle to do it regularly?

Rob: I was complaining once to a friend about all the demands of being a parent, and she told me, "Well, it makes you holy." I try to embrace that. Spirituality isn't only in the quiet moments and special times with God. Spirituality is also the work of parenting. Our goal isn't to feel peaceful with God, our purpose is to be like Christ. Find the time you can to talk with God; quiet yourself when you have the opportunity. But remember that God gave you those children too, and he is with you as you parent.  

Emily: In the second part of the book, you focus on the importance of spiritual disciplines such as multi-sensory worship and acts of service. Can you describe some other disciplines you and Clarissa practice on a regular basis? 

Rob: Sometimes, I need to change my perspective and see what I'm already doing as a discipline and sometimes I try to add a small ritual to my life. We read children's devotional books to the kids every night. We have a weekly prayer group at our house. We try to say the evening prayer from the Book of Common Prayer on a regular basis. I try to fast in some form during Lent.  I have been wanting to memorize Scripture, but that's been difficult for me.

Emily: You dedicated this book to several youth leaders from your past who helped you learn to pray. Having grown up in the same church movement as you, I know the Anglican tradition is in many ways very different, yet you seem to treasure aspects of both. Can you describe your former church's approach to the spiritual disciplines vs. your current church's approach? How do they differ and what have your learned/gained from each?

Rob: Yes, the church movement I grew up in was very "low church" compared to even a low church Anglican congregation. However, my church growing up did teach me to pray in a deep and intentional way, something that isn't really taught in many churches today. I learned to focus my mind in a way that I could be present with God. The Anglican tradition creates this kind of space in its services, too. While it isn't spontaneous in the same way as what I grew up with, it still allows for the Holy Spirit to guide our thoughts through a structured service that becomes very meaningful.

Emily: What do you hope pastors and church leaders take away from your points about genuine community and spiritual disciplines? How should the studies you've presented inform the way church leaders minister to or guide their flocks?

Rob: Our connection to other people is an absolutely essential part of our spiritual life. We need churches that connect us to others, not ones that put on a show. Too often our churches are more geared toward attracting attendees than creating disciples. Smaller churches with better connections produce more active, engaged, committed Christians. They grow faster and have more converts. People who are more connected socially give more and volunteer more.

If you enjoyed Rob's insights here, be sure to check out What Your Body Knows About God, as well as Rob’s first book, The Art of Dying. For a chance to win your very own copy, comment below to be entered in my drawing! Unlike most of my ways to lure traffic to the blog, this give-away is open to anyone in the continental U.S. :)

Review of "Just Babies" by Paul Bloom

Several years ago, developmental psychologist Paul Bloom found babies preferred puppets they saw as helpful or kind over those who acted mean or unhelpful. In his book Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, Bloom expands on these findings to try to uncover the source of human morality. I remember seeing a 60 Minutes segment on Bloom's study, so I was curious to read what other insights the Yale professor had to share. While I enjoyed Bloom's wit and breadth of knowledge, this book eventually disappointed me. The scientific analysis in Just Babies is not the kind that inspired me to my truest, best self. Instead, Bloom seems to employ dozens of studies involving babies, children and adults to reduce everything that makes us human to products of natural selection-- from our sense of right and wrong, to gut reactions, to compassion and altruism. In the end, reading Bloom's version of the natural history of morality left me feeling demoralized.

What I initially liked about the book was Bloom's candid, approachable style. Here's an accomplished scholar who humanizes the cold clinical data by inserting himself into hypothetical scenarios involving run-away trolley cars and drowning children. At first, I was happily carried along by the author's survey of various experiments and his quirky sense of humor. I found myself hypothesizing what other reasons babies might prefer right-doers and try to punish wrong-doers at a few months old. Are babies hardwired with a sense of justice? If they are, is this a virtue written on our hearts by God or teased out of the genetic pool by evolution over the eons? Could this behavior be explained away as learned behavior-- which, having raised three babies myself, I would bet that infants are absorbing information from their families long before they are explicitly taught right and wrong. So then, are we born as moral blank slates? Or are we born originally sinful and depraved?

I had fun exploring these possibilities within my own Christ-centered worldview. But eventually Bloom's relentless reliance on evolution as the force, source and, basically, the answer to all the questions of the universe, made reading the last third of the book a chore for me. When he finally acknowledges the possible role religion has on shaping morals, he argues that our morals came first and religion followed, using examples of the harm done in the name of God. I think many people who are serious about their faith will make a big distinction between those who zealously emphasize right beliefs and those who feel led by a Higher Power to lives of love, compassion and service. Bloom seems to lump all versions of religion together, and in so doing, can easily claim that morals couldn't possibly spring from what he quotes C.S. Lewis calling "the voice of God within our souls" (189). To this and other philosophers and scientists who propose evolution couldn't possibly produce our level of morality, Bloom compares them to "men marveling at eyeglasses and arguing that since natural selection couldn't have created such intricate wonders they must be the handiwork of God" (190).

Just as the eyeglasses were wrought by human hands, Bloom argues that human morality is a product of our prodigious brains' "magnificent capacity for reason" (218). I took this epiphany in the final paragraph of the final chapter of the book to be the author's attempt at saying there's something special and inspiring and noteworthy and mysterious about our human preoccupation with good and evil after all. But if pressed, I believe Bloom would concede that even this inspiring added ingredient to evolution's moral recipe is a product of ... natural selection. Therefore, as a Christian (and even as one who is open to the idea of theistic evolution) I don't recommend this book, which I feel would give false comfort to atheists and a trolley car full of cognitive dissonance to even the most open-minded Christians, not to mention abrasive annoyance to staunch Creationists.

*I received a complimentary copy of this book from Blogging For Books in exchange for my honest review.*