A Time for Wisdom: Knowledge, Detachment, Tranquility, Transcendence

These are volatile times. Fear, suspicion, and cynicism are chronic. A mere tweet inflames the passions of millions while click-bait “hot takes” stoke the amygdalas of everyone with an Internet connection.  We treat those not in our tribe as a threat and deem anyone with a different opinion as evil. Mistaking myopia for measure, we lack all sense of proportion in our judgments. We are shortsighted, mired in the present, ignorant of history, and blind to the future. We thought that technology would save us by connecting us to each other and the world’s information. Instead, it enticed our vices, encouraged our biases, and eroded the one virtue we need now more than ever: wisdom.

A Time for Wisdom is for readers who feel beleaguered by the incivility of the modern world, dispirited by its coarse rhetoric and toxic partisanship. It is an invitation to escape the shallow cacophony and restore peace and perspective to our daily lives. Written by two psychologists, the book takes the best scientific research on wisdom and integrates it with timeless concepts that have, for ages, guided troubled souls through life’s hardships. From this foundation, the authors present four steps we can follow to practice wisdom in the 21st Century:

1. Receiving knowledge.
2. Practicing detachment.
3. Experiencing tranquility.
4. Cultivating transcendence.

These are profound and spiritual principles that can bring us immense satisfaction when we aspire to live by them.

In A Time for Wisdom, the authors show us how. They commend a course of action towards the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, towards calm and clear moral reasoning. They lead us out of the circus of contemporary life and show us a path beyond our petty self-centeredness. By journeying along that path, we can, like the great sages and scientists before us, rise above the immediacy of the moment and partake of the numinous and the infinite.

Paul McLaughlin (PsyD, George Fox University) graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, with a bachelor’s degree in religious studies and a minor in philosophy. He received a master’s degree in theology and Christian ministry from Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, before obtaining a doctorate in clinical psychology from George Fox University in Newberg, Oregon.

McLaughlin has coauthored several published journal articles to include his dissertation in the Journal of Positive Psychology. His research interests include the integration of psychology, religion and spirituality, depth psychology, and positive psychology. He is currently a licensed clinical psychologist in Salem, Oregon. 

Mark McMinn (PhD, Vanderbilt University) is faculty emeritus and scholar-in-residence at George Fox University. McMinn is a licensed psychologist in Oregon, a fellow and former president of APA’s Division 36, Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, and board-certified in clinical psychology through the American Board of Professional Psychology.

McMinn has authored or coauthored 14 books, coedited 4 books, and published over 130 book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles. His books Finding Our Way Home and The Science of Virtue received Awards of Merit in the annual Christianity Today book awards. He also is the author of Psychology, Theology, and Spirituality in Christian Counseling, which has sold approximately 100,000 copies over a 24-year span.