Psychology & Religion Research Group

Eolene Boyd-MacMillan

• Associate Researcher, (Applied Subgroup), Psychology and Religion Research Group
• Associate Staff (Lecturer, Supervisor, Examiner), The School of Health in Social Science, Department of Counselling and Psychotherapy, University of Edinburgh
  
• External Lecturer, Cambridge Theological Federation
• External Examiner, London School of Theology (Counselling and Theology)

Profile

The nature and dynamics of spiritual transformation have been an abiding interest of Eolene Boyd-MacMillan through differing careers in politics, church ministry, and academia. After taking her degree at UCLA in English Literature and History, she worked in the White House and U. S. Department of the Treasury for four years before going to Fuller Theological Seminary in Southern California to complete a Masters of Divinity. There she worked as a church consultant and spiritual director before relocating to Hong Kong to teach at the Lutheran Theological Seminary. While in Hong Kong she took a further degree at the University of Hong Kong in Psychology producing a thesis on the transforming effects of spiritual direction, pastoral counselling, therapy, and ‘other church involvements’. Anxious to do further research in this area of individual and group transformation she then came to Cambridge to do her Ph.D. under Fraser Watts, Denys Turner, and David Ford on contemporary theological and psychological transformation theories linked to classic Christian spiritual writings. Upon finishing her doctorate she began teaching for the Cambridge Theological Federation, acquired her counselling and spiritual direction credentials, and joined the Psychology and Religion Research Group as Research Associate. Her book, Transformation: James Loder, Mystical Spirituality, and James Hillman, was published in 2004 and in 2007 she co-authored The Human Face of Church: A Social Psychology and Pastoral Theology Resource for Traditional and Pioneer Ministry. Her experience in so many different fields has made her a “hyphenated thinker,” a creator of unlikely partnerships – conceptual, interdisciplinary, and practical –  for research and teaching.

Research interests

‘Why do some people change and others seem not to?’ First asking this question as a teen, Eolene has straddled the macro and micro responses all of her professional life, exploring the ways that structures, systems, groups and individuals can both support and sabotage their own and others’ change processes. This quest has led her to distinguish between change and transformation, the former as a shift for the better, the latter as a re-structuring through the bringing together of opposite or incompatible perspectives to reveal a deeper truth or reality (examples being light as wave and particle, Picasso’s multiple perspectives in one painting, and Jesus as God and Man). Since her entry into higher education, she has been convinced that the hyphenated thinking of inter-disciplinarity facilitates more satisfactory, adequate, and elegant explorations of human experience. Whether moving her professional base from government to academia, connecting the psychologically informed Christian theological account of transformation of James Loder to the purely psychological (self-described) anti-Christian account of transformation of James Hillman (see Transformation), arguing for disciplinary hospitality between psychology and theology (with Peter Hampson, IJPR Archives, 2008), linking research and teaching with counselling and spiritual direction, or working for Cambridge while living in Edinburgh, she has found that unlikely partnerships yield greater insights than either partner alone. The transformational potential of conflict (see The Human Face of Church) led her to co-design a conflict transformation course for senior church leaders navigating conflicts between incompatible perspectives. Her next projects involve narrative transformation, the inter-face of spiritual/religious and psychological perspectives on transformation, and combine teaching and advisory commitments in Edinburgh, Cambridge, London and south-east Asia. She has counselling and spiritual direction practices in Edinburgh.