Carl Jung Shadow Work for Christians: Jungian Shadow Work, Inner Healing, and the Psychology of Wholeness - Couverture souple

Burnham, Jon

Couverture souple

ISBN 13 : 9798251971989

Editeur : Independently published, 2026

Synopsis

You were taught to pray away the darkness. What if Jesus walked straight into his?

You've prayed, served, believed. And something still feels broken. That's a crisis of self-knowledge, not faith. The church taught you to confess your sins. Nobody taught you to meet them.

Carl Jung spent his life mapping the part of the human psyche that Christianity mostly ignores. The shadow. The hidden interior. The accumulation of everything you were trained to push down and pretend wasn't there.

This book is about that. As a fulfillment of faith, not a departure from it.

The shadow work Jung described isn't pagan or anti-Christian. It's closer to what Paul called the "old man" and what the desert fathers called the passions. The unexamined material that quietly runs your life whether you acknowledge it or not. The person who loses their temper in traffic while listening to a sermon on patience. The pastor who preaches grace every Sunday and can't extend it to himself on Monday. The faithful churchgoer who helps everyone and secretly resents all of them.

That's an unintegrated shadow. Most people in the church have never been given a name for it.

Most Christians have been taught that the solution to interior darkness is more prayer, more service, more surrender. And those things matter. But they're not the same as actually turning around and looking at what's following you. Jung's great contribution was a practical method for doing that. This book translates that method into a Christian framework, one that honors the depth of the tradition while taking seriously the full scope of what it means to be human.

The shadow carries information. The parts of yourself you learned to hide didn't disappear. They went underground and learned to work indirectly. Anger became passive resistance. Pride became self-deprecation with a sting in its tail. Fear became overcontrol. The shadow keeps doing this until you look.

Shadow work in a Christian context is stewardship. You are responsible for the whole of your interior life, the parts you're comfortable showing at church and the parts you aren't. Carl Jung understood this. So did Thomas Aquinas, who wrote about the passions with a psychological precision that would feel at home in a modern therapist's office. So did the mystics, who knew that the dark night of the soul was preparation. Clearing work. God's patience, not his displeasure.

This book includes a complete 40-day retreat structure, built for Lent or any season of serious interior work. It will not make you feel better immediately. The point is to make you more whole. And wholeness, in the Christian tradition, is what sanctification has always been pointing toward. The full human being, examined and gathered up, instead of perpetually divided against himself.

Jon Burnham is a Presbyterian pastor and Doctor of Ministry with more than thirty years of pastoral experience in Houston, Texas. He writes from inside the work, not from above it.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Independently published
• Date d'édition: 2026
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 13: 9798251971989
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 236
• Coordonnées du fabricant: Printed by Amazon on behalf of the author; https://www.amazon.fr/hz/contact-us; ; c/o Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l., 38 Avenue John F. Kennedy; Luxembourg; L-1855; Luxembourg