“The purpose of this book is to help the reader understand how the broken brain does not work, (analogy to a broken arm) to set the broken brain in the context of the gospel, and to discover how the church can bring comfort to the mentally ill and their families by watching for a Galatians 5:22-24 moment.”

A Christian Guide to Mental Illness by David Murray and Tom Karel Jr. sits on my list of the top five books about the topic of mental iIlness. Written in 2023 and 244 pages long, this book is divided into 30 short chapters which can easily be read in minutes/small chunks of time.
What makes this book especially unique and helpful is the very candid personal stories on the topic. At the risk of being pegged a gadfly, I will not repeat any of the personal stories. Suffice it to say that these stories add a definite tone of humility and utter dependence on the Lord, not to mention “personal touch” which draws the reader in and makes the book a “page turner”.
If my new method of marking especially helpful pages is any indication of the helpfulness of a book, about a dozen pages are marked with a folded corner to revisit, repeat and dig into again, indicating a very helpful book indeed. Also, the chapter titled “The Story Behind This Book” is very personal and adds a wonderful dimension to the contents. “Due to their painful experience of trying to care for Gary through these traumatic years, Norman and his wife, Vicki, felt called of God to donate this money ($70,000, which had been realized from Gary’s estate – Gary had been Norman’s brother and  had schizophrenia) to a research project (this very book!  Thank you!) that would ultimately help Christians care for other Christians with mental illness.” The very last line of the book (before the index) reads: “The purpose of this book is to help the reader understand how the broken brain does not work, (analogy to a broken arm) to set the broken brain in the context of the gospel, and to discover how the church can bring comfort to the mentally ill and their families by watching for a Galatians 5:22-24 moment.”
The first 11 chapters or almost 100 pages focus on mental illness: what it is, how it affects the sufferer and spiritual life and those around the sufferer. Moreover, addressed are how people react to having it, hurdles to recovery and causes.
The next chapters (12-18, about 50 pages) focus on roles such as the roles pastors play in helping sufferers, role of church community, role of family and friends. Furthermore, the part that professionals play, medications and biblical counselors are touched on.
The last 11 chapters (19-30) answer primarily “How can we…” questions. How can we help a sufferer grow spiritually, how can we help someone who is suicidal, and how can care be given for the caregivers. The last question deserves a full book – there’s so much more that can be said about caring for caregivers.
Some favorite parts – the authors give very helpful explanations of the two main types of mental illness, although there is overlap and both may be present in one person. The two categories are primarily affective (mood) disorders and mind disorders. The mood disorders mainly affect the mood or emotions and include anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, …” page 24 The second main category is primarily thought (mind) disorders. “While the affective disorders are often disabling and devastating, perhaps more confusing and perplexing are the diagnoses classified under ‘thought disorders.’ These diagnoses would include: schizophrenia … psychosis.” There’s an ongoing struggle to “make sense out of reality.” This involves very disordered thoughts and often an inability to communicate effectively.  These two authors also face the fact and effectively communicate the reality of voices, a topic often glossed over, and at times, disregarded or not thought to be true. Well, voices  are for real, both auditory and visual hallucinations are for real, speaking of those that are  not drug induced.
Another very helpful page was page 61 where the authors discuss submission and service. In the context of the chapter on “How does mental illness affect those around the sufferer,” we read that part of a healthy response to mental illness is “accepting God’s will in the matter.” “We stop fighting and denying. We bow down and say ‘Not my will, but your will be done.’ Going further, those around the sufferer must recognize and accept the sufferer’s limitations and “adjust accordingly.” Accept it, don’t think or try to change it. Why? :This is the only way to silence torturous questions like, “Why me?” or “Why them?”
The comments about service were very much appreciated as a clear recognition of the long term problem mental illness often is and repercussions. “…therefore it’s best if we frame it as one of the primary areas in which we serve God, rather than as an inconvenience that may hinder our service to God.” How freeing and affirming to read that on page 61.
In the section pertaining to the role the church community has, the reader is reminded that although mental illness isolates people and “makes them feel unloved and unwanted, deepening the illness,” we should never “underestimate the power of including them and welcoming them in the church family.” In other words, “Mental illness cuts off, but the church family connects.” page 109 (Reviewer’s note: another book could be written on this and the great need of the church to do more.)
There are so many more gems and highlights of wisdom in this book. It’s really like a treasure trove, and very readable. In fact, the use of white space, bold headings, parenthetical quotes and chapter summaries including problem, insights and action, plus stories, make the book very readable, not daunting which one might think, given the subject matter.
A shortcoming of the book is the too short chapter on caring for caregivers. This is such a neglected topic in the whole discussion. (After all, there are still people who think the parent caused the issue or that the sufferer can merely snap out of it…even some who think it’s contagious and they might catch it if they get too close.) So much more could and should someday be written about the caregivers who often rarely get out because they cannot leave their loved one alone. There are many reasons for this, which may warrant yet another book! There are concerns that a voice could tell someone to leave the house and go away, a voice that could say hurt yourself or someone else. And what of the little man in the tree looking back? Or the face in the radio, looking back to torment. Who can write that book?
Jane Vos is a graduate of Reformed Bible College (now Kuyper College). She is married to Douglas Vos, publisher of The Aquila Report. She is a mother to five, grandmother to 14 plus two foster grandbaby boys. Jane was born into a family with a history of mental illness. She’s read dozens of books on the topic both from a Christian perspective and secular perspective. Jane recognizes that mental illness is something that must be accepted and stewarded for the glory of God.
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The Christian study center movement is poised to offer something much more than some Christian window-dressing to the intellectual life of the university; it can offer instead a picture of what the university was meant to be: a community of shared learning that receives the gifts of God and reflects them back into the world.

This fall, I had the honor of speaking at the launch of the new South Carolina Study Center in Columbia, S.C. Occupying a charming historic white house across the street from the University of South Carolina, the SCSC is just the latest representative of a bold new movement that is challenging Christians to rethink the nature and purpose of higher education. The term “study center” may evoke images of Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri and its various offshoots, retreat spaces offering a space for reading, rest, reflection, and mentorship for Christians and seekers alike. But the Christian study center movement, though inspired by Francis Schaeffer’s compelling blend of faith and scholarship, has forged a model for engagement at the very center of modern intellectual and cultural life—the public research university.
Since the formation of the first Christian study center at the University of Virginia in 1975, the Consortium of Christian Study Centers has grown to include 38 member institutions. Initially, most did little more than offer a thoughtful Christian add-on or occasional antidote to whatever was going on in the neighboring university: a C.S. Lewis reading group….
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Contrary to the false hopes encouraged by agnostic modern thought and modern medicine, the death of the body is only the beginning of sorrows for those who have been so foolish as to live apart from God and continue in sin. After death there is a day of judgment slated on the calendar of God; all must appear before His tribunal, and none shall be spared (2 Corinthians 5:10).

There is a remarkable difference between how an unbeliever and a believer look at dying, death, and the afterlife. For the unbeliever or the agnostic, death is mysterious and the afterlife is even more dubious. For the believer, death is not an extinction or a terminus but only a transition, a junction. Though solemn, it is demystified in Christ and the afterlife is the best life. Let’s consider this contrast.
After Death—Agnosticism’s Version
Sally, the hospice nurse, stood by Bruno’s bedside.1 Bruno was a prisoner with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), who had been transferred to the hospital with his fifth bout of pneumonia in the past six months.2 He was serving a life sentence for the murder of his elderly neighbor, who had attempted to stop him from stealing his narcotic pain medications. While incarcerated, he developed ALS, underwent a tracheotomy, and became dependent on a ventilator to breathe.3 Bruno had a choice: return to prison on the ventilator until suffering the next bout of pneumonia with the possibility of dying by suffocation; or, have the ventilator withdrawn, receiving medications to manage his respiratory distress, and dying in the luxury of a hospice facility. Needless to say, Bruno, who thought he was the victim of injustice, did not like his choices.
As he lay silent with expressive eyes, paralyzed, his right wrist handcuffed to the bedrail, and a prison guard by his side, Sally presented her case for hospice care: “Bruno, I know this is a difficult choice to make, but we will keep you comfortable after the ventilator is removed. You won’t have to go back to prison—you won’t suffer anymore.”
Sally was presenting the common view that what happens after death is in some way better than persisting in this present state, even for unrepentant murderers who see themselves as victims of the system. In Europe and America, it is quite acceptable to choose or create a self-customized hereafter. If one wants to believe in nirvana, reincarnation, a happy hunting ground, heaven, any combination of these possibilities, or else simple annihilation, the modernist will not object—provided the belief is not imposed on others. According to the modern mindset, no one really knows what happens after death. “What is emphatically clear is that everyone is dying, and one day, we will all die,” says the modernist, “so why not permit the imagination to wander when it comes to the hereafter?”
For many centuries the church was the predominant institution addressing dying, death, and what happens after death, not hospices and medical institutions that could be indifferent to or at odds with traditional Christianity. Following the beginning of the scientific age in the seventeenth century, the medicalization of death in the nineteenth century, and the increasing effectiveness of medical science in the decades that followed, the church was pushed aside. A paradigm shift occurred. The church is now on the periphery and modern medicine has shifted to the center. Moving into the twentieth century, many hospitals in the West, once Christian institutions in purpose, ethics, and practice, have become Christian in name only. Influenced by the rise of higher criticism, liberal theology, and the social gospel, these hospitals no longer affirm a supernatural-natural Christ-centered worldview grounded in Holy Scripture. In the twenty-first century, modern medicine is eager to fill the void left by the traditional, confessional, and biblical church.
Since the two absolutes of dying and death have become medicalized—that is, as aspects of human experience to be addressed by doctors and nurses rather than by ministers of the Word or one’s fellow Christians—it is not surprising to see healthcare professionals, like Sally, asserting an unqualified view of what happens after death to provide answers, comfort, and hope. This position is commonly referred to as agnosticism, which is derived from the Greek agnosis meaning “a state of unknowing,” that is, with respect to metaphysical questions such as the existence of God or an afterlife. Thus, an agnostic claims not to know matters beyond his or her ability to observe or quantify them. This approach to empirical or scientific facts has the appearance of humility. As a philosophical system, however, agnosticism is a proud and unconditional assertion in which all that can be known with certainty must be measured, tested, demonstrated, and verified by hands-on experience. Agnosticism is an outright rejection of non-empirical truth, which claims, without empirical validation, the impossibility of knowing truth outside the process of scientific investigation!
Two major issues stand behind agnosticism in the contemporary West: pluralism and the eventual failure of medical science to sustain life. In western democracies, citizens have a right to believe what they choose, so long as they do not act on their beliefs in violation of civil law and they tolerate other people’s beliefs. All of these personal views address the hereafter in some way, so agnosticism provides a vehicle for tolerance and affirmation.
Another primary factor already alluded to is the innate human need for answers, comfort, and hope. Dying and death are absolute—we are dying, and one day we will cease to be as we are now. This is mysterious, uncomfortable, and even dreadful. Someday medical science will fail us, when the doctor says he can do no more for us. After all the optimistic counsel from well-meaning healthcare professionals and hopeful state-of-the-art medical treatments, dying and death stand firm and fixed on our human agendas—then what? In modern medical practice a referral to hospice is made, and end-of-life experts come alongside to support individualized answers, provide comfort in the midst of suffering, and affirm one’s self-customized hopes for some good or life after death.
Death as a Natural Part of Life
In a similar way, modern medicine commonly promotes the view that death is a natural and normal part of human existence. Since dying is a process running parallel with life, in modern medicine the death of the body has become associated with the outworking of natural laws of life. In medical literature, one will often find dying and death associated with pregnancy and birth, or as a stage in a natural process, much like a caterpillar emerging from a cocoon as a butterfly. This interpretation is rooted in the rise of evolutionary biology in the late nineteenth century. According to this viewpoint, no line exists between dying and the death of the body, because they are both the outworking of natural laws of survival occurring in the larger cycle of life. Thus, people facing death should accept and even welcome death with optimism as a transition to a self-customized hereafter.
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