ARTICLE REVIEW

Article Review

Article Review

This paper aims to review a peer-reviewed journal article, to discuss the use of prayer and scripture. The combination of prayer and scripture is used in different disciplines like philosophy, psychology, religion and often in people management. The article that will be reviewed in this study is “use of prayer and scripture in cognitive-behavioral therapy” published in Journal of Psychology and Christianity in 2007. The article was written by Siang-Yang Tan, a notable scholar in the field of psychology. The selected article discusses how psychologist can use prayer and scripture in behavioral therapy of their clients. The article begins with reviewing several works of previous scholars in this domain, to support and validate the topic and purpose of this study.

It has been argued in the articles that behavioral therapy can be divided into three generations: first generation based on the traditional approach, the second generation, consists of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), (widely practiced presently) and the third generation is based on different contextual approaches which paved the way for accepting mindfulness in cognitive behavioral therapy. However, in recent years more explicit religious/spiritual based therapies have been developed, which have also been proven effective so far in dealing with clinical disorder, anxiety and several other psychological disease.

The articles attempt to recommend appropriate and ethical methods of using prayer and scriptures in psychological therapies. The author has also discussed the approach employed by Christians in CBT, like dealing with clients to tackle their problems using inner healing, faith, wisdom, the words of God and other methods. In this connection, two different integrations have been proposed for therapies, which include implicit and explicit integration. The implicit integration refers to approach which does not openly discusses religious or spiritual resources but in a diplomatic way. On the contrary, explicit integration refers to the approach which is more overt, and directly deals with religious and spiritual resources systematically. Continuing the arguments regarding these two approaches and how Christian therapists used them to CBT, the author has mentioned several ways in the article to apply pray and scripture in behavioral therapy. (Tan, 2007)

The author has also discussed seven ways of inner healing using prayers and scriptures. The first step starts with praying to God, to obtain protection from evil, followed by guiding client into a state of peace (using claiming self talk, pleasant imagery, bible imagery etc). In the third step, client should be ...