Fall semester topics

• Week 36. Benefits of volunteer work
• Week 37. Living with learning disabilities
• Week 38. Personality disorders
• Week 39. Setting up healthy boundaries
• Week 40. Learning to improve concentration
• Week 41. Suicide prevention – learning to help
• Week 42. Phobias – dealing with fears
• Week 43. Sleep disorders
• Week 44. Sexuality – the biochemistry
• Week 45. Addictive relationships
• Week 46. UNESCO day of tolerance
• Week 47. Improving self-confidence
• Week 48. Helping friends or others in distress
• Week 49. World AIDS day – living with illness
• Week 50. Value based decision making
• Week 51. Being assertive in a diverse world
• Week 52. Spirituality – spiritual growth

Spring semester topics

• Week 1. Dynamics of intro- & extraverts
• Week 2. Orientation – a career that fits!
• Week 3. Living in a foreign country
• Week 4. Overcoming test anxiety
• Week 5. Understanding dysfunction in a family
• Week 6. Smoking – giving up methods
• Week 7. Valentine’s day – commitment
• Week 8. Communication – focusing on skills
• Week 9. Domestic violence
• Week 10. Work-life balance – expectations
• Week 11. Loneliness and feeling alone
• Week 12. Understanding of joy and happiness
• Week 13. Racial discrimination
• Week 14. PTSD
• Week 15. World health day
• Week 16. Panic disorders
• Week 17. Academic honesty – authenticity
• Week 18. Death and dying
• Week 19. Job interviews – good impression
• Week 20. Characteristic of sound families
• Week 21. Celebrating cultural diversity
• Week 22. Growing up in a single parent home
• Week 23. Act of love (self and others)
• Week 24. Focusing on personality tests
• Week 25. Childhood traumas
• Week 26. Relating to the elderly
• Week 27. Grief – dealing with loss
• Week 28. Drug and substance abuse
• Week 29. Dealing with depression
• Week 30. Procrastination
• Week 31. Recovering from shame and guilt
• Week 32. Perfectionism
• Week 33. First generation university students
• Week 34. Compulsive obsessive behaviors
• Week 35. Body image – eating disorders
• Week 36. School bullying – mobbing concerns

Spirituality – spiritual growth from the Christian perspective

In the last 60 years particularly, it has been pointed out in social sciences, that beside mind and body there is also a strong spiritual aspect of the human psyche recently labeled as SQ – Spiritual Intelligence (beside IQ and EQ). We as individauls seek to understand the world around us not only horizontally, but in a vertical frame as well. People holding religious beliefs have a sense that there is more to life than just the current physical existence. Some argue, however, that psychology and religion (and theology specifically) has nothing in common. They should be separated and treated within its own contexts. Those on the other side view religious scriptures such as the Bible to be a living scripture – that talks to us in unexplainable ways. It can speak to our mind and soul in the same time as God wills it to reveal himself to us on his own terms in a very gentle way. Scripture tend to transmit guidelines for many thousansd of years now on how to live an honest, virtuous and transparent life, how to rid ourselves from the false self and insist to God’s reality (truth and righteousness.) See some interesting scientific articles below, from various aspects of Christian faith and its relationship to psychology.

Recommended books

Richard Rohr: From Wild Man to Wise Man: Reflections on Male Spirituality, 2005.
Ralph D. Mecklenburger: Our Religious Brains (What Cognitive Science Reveals About Belief, Morality, Community, and Our Relationship with God) 2012.
Kyriacos C. Markides: Inner River (A Pilgrimage to the Heart of Christian Spirituality), 2012.

Additional web resources