Modern studies of the Evangelical Revival and of John and Charles Wesley cannot avoid the revival's new emphasis on experience and the interior life. How are we to understand what Rack called the distinctively Wesleyan ‘pilgrim's progress’ from sin to perfection? Pauline Watson has worked as a consultant psychiatrist and psychotherapist and brings the insights of her profession to her analysis here. The title comes from Susanna Wesley, but also recognizes that both brothers navigated a long—and often messy—journey through life.
Karl Popper famously denied that Freudian psychoanalysis was a science. For him, it failed the great tests of falsifiability and repeatability. One of the more positive outcomes of postmodernism has been to increase suspicion of all grand narratives, whether of Popperian science, psychoanalysis, or religion. As Watson writes at the end of this intriguing and helpful book: ‘In the end this is only one narrative; it is merely a...
