Happiness is a Choice by Frank B. Minirth and Paul D Meier

I’ve been reading a lot about anxiety and depression lately, and it has led me to some older books, such as Happiness is a Choice by psychiatrists Frank B. Minirth and Paul D. Meier. The book appears to be written for a mixed audience of therapists who may be treating patients with depression and people who may pick up the book as a self-help guide. If depression is affecting your life, I recommend you talk to your physician or reach out for appropriate counseling; there are effective therapies and in some cases drugs may be appropropriate.

The book may be broken into three major parts. The first deals with the symptoms of depression. Though it is fairly widely know now (thanks largely to drug advertising), it was probably less known in 1978 when this book was published, that there are physical symptoms to depression. Feeling bad emotionally can make us feel bad physically and vice-versa.

The second part deals with the causes of depression. These are particularly stress and trauma. We all face trauma in life, and it does not have to be “major” to result in depression. We all grieve losses, get angry over the way we or others are mistreated, face dysfunction in relationships and countless other stresses and traumas. Any of us may suffer a blow that leads to depression.

“Who gets depressed? At some period of life, nearly everyone does!” Frank B. Minirth and Paul D. Meier, Happiness is a Choice

Finally, they deal with the treatment of depression. Much of Minirth and Meier’s advice deals with thinking and relationships. Therapy may occur at a counselor’s office, but healing takes place in everyday life, thoughts and relationships.

The book also contains appendices that deal with things that may be of more interest to therapist. These include a few very brief case studies, a short chapter on the biology of depression and additional information on various types of treatment.

Minirth and Meier are known as Christian counselors who discuss faith alongside medicine. This book is no exception. The authors reference the Bible and draw lessons from it. Though many may find useful advice in this book, I think it would especially appeal to Christian who are seeking help that is consistent with their faith. Their advice on overcoming depression and anxiety is rooted in their religion.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Anxious for Nothing by Max Lucado

The Mindful Way through Depression by Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindal Segal & Joh Kabat-Zinn

Rewire Your Anxious Brain by Catherine M. Pittman & Elizabeth M. Karle

The Solution by Lucinda Bassett

Think 4:8 by Tommy Newberry & Lyn Smith

12 “Christian” Beliefs That Can Drive You Crazy by Henry Cloud & John Townsend

Minirth, Frank B., and Paul D. Meier. Happiness is a Choice: A Manual on the Symptoms, Causes and Cures of Depression. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker House, 1978.

In Pursuit of Happiness by Frank Minirth

Happiness is something we can produce, at least in part, from the choices we make and the things we do. Psychiatrist Frank Minirth emphasizes the choices that lead to happiness in his book, In Pursuit of Happiness.

Minirth is particularly known for his work in Christian psychology. The book is full of references to the Bible, with scriptures selected to provide advice in several areas of life that have a strong effect no happiness. I found this to be one of the best parts of the book.

The author is also a medical doctor. As such, he also believes that some can benefit from drugs, other medical treatment and psychological counseling. He emphasizes the power of God, but he does not minimize the benefits of medicine. The main body of the book does not deal much with the medical treatment of depression, anxiety or other treatable disorders that affect happiness other to point to the potential benefits of medical treatment. However, the book includes several appendices on the biological causes and medical treatment (including drugs) of anxiety, depression, dementia and other diseases.

Most of the book is very easy to read. Each chapter plainly follows an outline and flows from subject to subject. To a great degree, readers may skip around to the chapters that are most relevant to them and still make sense of the book.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Anxious for Nothing by Max Lucado

The Beethoven Factor by Paul Pearsall

The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die by John Izzo

Happiness is a Choice by Barry Neil Kaufman

Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar

I Can Make You Happy by Paul McKenna

The Instinct to Heal by David Servan-Schreiber

It's Not Always Depression by Hilary Jacobs Hendel

Language and the Pursuit of Happiness by Chalmers Brothers

Lost Connections by Hari Johnson

The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People by David Niven

100 Ways to Happiness by Timothy Sharp

Rewire Your Anxious Brain by Catherine M. Pittman & Elizabeth M. Karle

Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat

Secrets You Keep from Yourself by Dan Neuharth

The Solution by Lucinda Bassett

Think 4:8 by Tommy Newberry & Lyn Smith

Vital Friends by Tom Rath

Minirth, Frank. In Pursuit of Happiness: Choices that Can Change Your Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Fleming H. Revell, 2004.

Unimaginable by Jeremiah H. Johnston

What would the world be like if Christ had never come and the Christian church had never been create? New Testament scholar Jeremiah J. Johnston imagines it would be a bleak place. He describes why he thinks so in Unimaginable.

Johnston contrasts the Christian worldview, and its results, with cultures where non-Christian worldviews were dominant. The first of these is the pre-Christian era, especially Greek and Roman culture in the centuries shortly before and after the ministry of Jesus Christ. The second is the 20^th Century political regimes that opposed Christian mores if not religion altogether: Nazism, Fascism and Communism. Adolf Hitler and Bonito Mussolini imagined a return to a pre-Christian, pagan age of Aryan or Roman dominance. The Communists were opposed to any religion; the state operating on behalf of the workers was the dominant force. These movements in some ways were reversions to the morals that predated Christian influence.

The gods of Greece and Rome were immoral characters who had little concern for humanity. The Caesars, god-kings, were largely selfish and self-aggrandizing. In contrast, the Christian God proclaimed His love for people. He demonstrated his benevolence in Jesus, son of God and king of kings, who lived a humble life of service and sacrifice.

Life was cheap in ancient Greek and Roman culture. For instance, babies who were diseased or deformed, or simply girls, were often abandoned to die. In contrast, Christians believed that human life was inherently valuable.

Women were not considered equal to men in pre-Christian times. In contrast, women were present at the major events in Jesus’ ministry and were often acknowledged in the New Testament for their leadership in the early church.

Women were considered of little worth in the ancient world. In addition, slavery and racism were common in the in the Greek and Roman Empires. The superiority of some people was considered plain, and it was appropriate for them to dominate, control and enslave lesser people. Jesus taught that there was no meaningful difference between races (Jews or Greeks), free men and slaves, or the sexes.

There was not religious freedom in the Roman Empire. The Jews were tolerated because of the antiquity of their religion, but others were required to worship the major Roman gods and to acknowledge the divinity of Caesar. Christians were considered atheists for their refusal to acknowledge Roman gods.

Johnston describes an opening of the door in the late 19^th Century to anti-Christian ideas and morals. Philosophers and scientists of the time such as Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Friederich Nietzche and Sigmund Freud were committed to a materialistic view of the world. Humans were not special creations; they were simply sophisticate animals that arrived from the same undirected happenstance that brought for every other thing without purpose. Religion and morals were inventions of people, not revelations from a higher authority.

These influencers, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, challenged Christian morals. They opened the door to devaluing human life, devaluing women (Nietche was explicit about his belief that women were inferior to men), justifying racism with science along with subjugation of “lesser” races, and the elimination of religious freedom, or even individual freedom. The likes of Hitler, Mussolini and Josef Stalin put these ideas into practice, leading to impoverishment, oppression, and death for millions of people.

Some would lay a lot of suffering at the feet of Christianity. Johnston argues that Christianity has alleviated a lot of suffering and paganism and atheism have much greater sums of human misery on their accounts.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

The Language of God by Francis S. Collins

Maus by Art Spiegelman

The Road to Serfdom by F. A. Hayek

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

The Victory of Reason by Rodney Stark

Johnston, Jeremiah H. Unimaginable: What Our World Would Be Like Without Christianity. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2017.

Lift by Daniel Kunitz

Trends in fitness in the 2000s have given to new sports, such as the CrossFit games, and new athletic entertainments in the form of American Ninja Warrior. Daniel Kunitz traces the rise of this new fitness culture, which he calls New Frontier Fitness or NFF, in his Lift.

 Kunitz goes back to the ancient Greeks, who revered physical beauty and fitness and considered it the obligation of citizens (only men were citizens) to keep themselves in good shape in order to serve and defend their nation. The Greek word for this training was askesis.

 The English word asceticism has it root in askesis. While we now associate it with self-denial, the Greeks associated it with purposeful self-discipline. Participants in NFF have embraced this old-fashioned asceticism, training purposefully with benefits that spill into all areas of life.

 As an aside, Christian asceticism is often associated with self-denial, sometime extreme, for the purpose of penance. When I read Paul’s writing on denial of self, I see it described in the context of disciplining oneself with the purpose of living a higher life. He even uses athletes as an example. He is not denigrating athletes for training for a worthless prize. He is reminding Christians that they have and even more important calling that deserves at least an equal commitment and effort.

 Of course, few cultures since then have reveled in physical achievement. Exercise at times has been considered dangerous to health. Weightlifting too much resembles labor, a task for lower-class people that wealthy and middle-class people were reluctant to embrace. Even when exercise became more acceptable, starting in the 1960s and taking off in the 1980s, the focus was often on appearance.

 NFF is not concerned with appearance. It is concerned with performance. If one trains to perform well, appearance will take care of itself.

 Because of this focus on function, NFF eschews many of the machines found in gyms. Exercises resemble tasks one might actually perform, though with greater intensity intended to push skill and physical capacity. NFF participants train like an athlete, constantly reaching to do better, not to look better but to live better. As Kunitz says several times, they are “training for life.”

 From a historical point of view, Lift covers a lot of the same ground as Making the American Body by Jonathan Black. However, Kunitz is specifically intending to give context to NFF and its influence on how people think about being fit today.

 Though Kunitz is a professional writer, he is also a fan of NFF. He practices CrossFit, which he discusses in the book, and Olympic lifting. He also talks to people who train in other functional regimes like parkour and sweatier forms of yoga.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Mr. America by Mark Adams

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

 Kunitz, Daniel. Lift: Fitness Culture, from Naked Greeks and Acrobats to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors. New York: Harper Wave, 2016.

Pascal's Wager by James A. Connor

Blaise Pascal had a great impact on mathematics. He laid the foundations of our mathematical understanding of probability. A computer programming language was named for him.

Pascal was also a deeply religious man and philosopher. His book Pensées is read as a devotional by many Christians. His argument that the belief in God is rational is widely known.

James A. Connor takes the name of that argument for the name of his biography of the man, Pascal’s Wager. Connor considers both Pascal’s life in science and math and his religious convictions.

For many, there is no conflict in scientific study and religious devotion, but there was for Pascal. He was a Jansenist, though somewhat at odds with the leaders of the movement because of his interests in science and philosophy. The Jansenists were deeply concerned with sin and living a life of penitence; to pursue anything else was to embrace worldliness. Pascal loved the discoveries he made by reason and experiment, but he also longed for a life of purity and closeness to God.

Pascal was seen as a bit of a mathematical prodigy, especially in his youth when his father led a secular life by the standards of the day. He published a pamphlet on conic sections when he was 16 years old. He invented a calculating machine, the Pascaline, when he was 19. He was still fairly young by modern standards when he developed a theory of probability in a series of letter he exchanged with Pierre Fermat.

He had a mystical experience in 1654 that changed his focus in life. He told know one about it, but wrote a note about it that he kept pinned in his coat to carry with him the rest of his life. The note was discovered by his nephew shortly after his death.

After his experience, he devoted more of his time to supporting Jansenism, which his entire family had come to follow, especially his sister, Jacqueline, a nun. Jansenists were in conflict with other Catholics over their views on original sin and election, especially with the Jesuits. Pascal became an apologist for Jansenism, and especially mocked the Jesuits in The Provincial Letters.

Politics and religion were deeply linked in 17^th Century France, and the conflict between Pascal’s sect and the wider French Catholic church became a conflict with Louis XIV. He felt that the Jansenist leaders capitulated to the king and the Jesuits, which brought him into conflict with them as well.

Though religious debates had been part of his entire life, this heating up of the conflict to such a level occurred toward the end of his life. He expressed his devotion to God in self-imposed poverty and care for the poor; which in one case took the form of establishing the first public transportation system. He did not abandon math, though, and published a paper on the cycloid as well. He had been sick most of his life and passed away in 1662 at the age of 39.

Connor’s book is approachable for most readers. Though Pascal’s fame today probably rests more on his accomplishments as a mathematician, Connor shows how his life was shaped by his religion and both the religious and secular traditions of his time (Connor is a former Jesuit priest).

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Chance by Amir Aczel

The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow

How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg

The Language of God by Francis S. Collins

On a Grander Scale by Lisa Jardine

The Unfinished Game by Keith Devlin

Connor, James A. Pascal’s Wager: The Man Who Played Dice with God. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.

Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking by Robert H. Schuller

In many ways Robert H. Schuller was the model of the modern megachurch pastor. He can be seen as a successor to Norman Vincent Peale in his blend of religion and self-help. They both preached that what you think matters.

Schuller wrote about what he called possibility thinking. He put it in the title of his book Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking.

Possibility thinking is a focus on how valuable ideas can be implemented and worthy goas achieved. Schuller contrasts this with impossibility thinking, a focus on why something won’t work or can’t be done. He believed a lot of great ideas were killed at conception in a rush to find problems, but it doesn’t have to be that way.

Move Ahead has the feel of a how-to book. Each chapter looks at some aspect of practicing possibility thinking. He breaks them down into a list of steps; he even numbers each step. He elaborates on the steps, usually including an illustrative story. Many of these stories draw on his experience founding a new church in California or on the experiences of members of his congregation. Other come from famous people, many of whom he had met.

Schuller speaks often of Christ and his religious faith. However, if you removed these references from Move Ahead, it would still be a self-help book—just a little shorter.

Robert H. Schuller also wrote

Life's Not Fair, but God is Good

Self Love

You Can Become the Person You Want to Be

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Be All You Can Be! by John C. Maxwell

I Declare by Joel Osteen

Positive Imaging by Norman Vincent Peale

The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale

Reposition Yourself by T. D. Jakes

You Can if You Think You Can by Norman Vincent Peale

You Can, You Will by Joel Osteen

Schuller, Robert H. Move Ahead with Possibility Thinking. 1967. Old Tappan, NJ: Spire Books, 1978.

Anxious for Nothing by Max Lucado

In the early chapters of Anxious for Nothing, pastor and author Max Lucado describes the kind of harried, distracted anxiety that people suffer in modern life. Many are depressed by troubling things going on all around that repeat all day on newscasts.

Honestly, that is not the reason I picked up the book. I did not have a particularly gloomy outlook. Nor was I consciously worked up about much. I was driving by an amygdala-induced fear that I didn’t understand. Even so, I read the rest of the book.

Anxious for Nothing is an extended sermon, taking its main text as Philippians 4:4-8. The Main points for the acronym CALM:

-celebrate God’s goodness,

-ask God for help,

-leave your concerns with Him and

-meditate on good things.

“Rejoice in the Lord always. Again I will say, rejoice! Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and mind ins Christ Jesus.” Philippians 4:4-8 (NKJV)

For Christians, there is plenty of good to be found in God that can allay our fears. God is in control. He has demonstrated His love and mercy toward us in Christ. He has a good plan for us and He is able to carry it out.

God hears our prayers for help. He invites us to ask for what we want. His own love for us motivates Him to answer our prayers; though sometimes He has better things in mind for us than we might imagine. We can rely on His promises, which He encourages us to rehearse, though He never forgets them.

Because we can rely on God, we can stop worrying. We can let things go. We can remind ourselves of all the way God has already helped us an rest in peace.

Finally, we can choose what we think about. Instead of worrying, we can abide in Christ. We can dwell on what God has done for us and what He has promised, and we can take courage.

Max Lucado also wrote

It's Not About Me

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Philippians

Rewire Your Anxious Brain by Catherine M. Pittman & Elizabeth M. Karle

The Solution by Lucinda Bassett

Lucado, Max. Anxious for Nothing: Finding Calm in a Chaotic World. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2017.