People enjoy different kinds of candy. I started thinking of this when I saw a new Kit Kat commercial. It was about some kind of chunky version. They showed the layers of dark chocolate and wafers, and I remembered what it was like to bite into one of the standard versions. I felt a sudden urge to go out and purchase the new kind. But it’s just candy. It might as well be a Snickers bar, or a Dove Bar. Oh yes! A Dove Bar. I used to get those and eat them like… well, candy.Kit Kat and Dove Bars are just two kinds of candy of course. There is soft and there is hard. There is filled. There is caramel, but watch out for your dental work.Recently, someone made me some peanut brittle, and I was telling her not to since I didn’t want it either to break off one of my teeth (there is a reason they call it “brittle”) or stick to them. Anyway, she assured me it would do neither and that it tasted great. She was right. Now I have a different problem: I am really trying to lose weight!There are still other kinds of candy. For instance, there is eye candy. Now, this is where it begins to get a bit tricky. If you are a woman, and you take five guys and line them up, which one would be considered to be “eye candy” (if any)? Or if you take one guy and five women, who of the women would think he was eye candy?Personally, when I see these announcements about this guy or that guy being the sexiest man, etc, I wonder to myself, “Oh yeah? What are they looking at?”Well, if you reverse it, and you take one guy and line up five women, which one would be eye candy? Ah-h. Now we will likely see a difference. The women might likely pick the best guy as eye candy but the guy might likely pick two, three, four, or even all five women as eye candy. One of my colleagues assures me its because of evolution.Well, enough of that.There is also mind candy. The big difference between mind candy and Dove Bars is that mind candy won’t rot your teeth and it helps prevent dementia. For some people this amounts to nothing much more than playing crossword puzzles or logic games.Personally, that stuff turns me off. Nothing sexy to me about logic. However, and I suppose it’s illogical, I do have my versions of mind candy, and mind candy can sneak up and entice me in unexpected ways.The movie ‘Inception’ was sweet! I love an intelligent movie. It’s mind candy for me if the plot and script are solid, the editing crisp, the acting sufficient, the sound where you can feel it, and the cinematography/special effects startling. That makes mind candy whole-person in nature because it gets to my mind through all my senses.Some books are mind candy. I loved the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas. My wife got me his biography of William Wilberforce for Christmas. I also have been attempting to read the relatively contemporary French phenomenological philosophers who have taken the “theological turn” in phenomenology. I am finding them challenging to understand, but what I experience are frequent epiphanies that inform my understanding of Christianity and relate to my understanding of psychotherapy at the same time at least gestalt psychotherapy, which is based to a large degree on continental philosophy.One such source of mind candy for me has been Jean-Louis Chrétien’s ‘The Call and the Response’.In that same vein, yesterday I received an invitation from a friend at Harvard to participate in a conference this coming autumn in Cambridge. The announcement and call for proposals to present describes it this way:“Erich Fromm bemoaned the divorce of psychology from philosophical and religious traditions and, in many ways, this artificial separation from our historical and conceptual siblings has only increased. The purpose of this conference is to enrich conversations at the intersections of philosophy, psychology, and theological/religious studies, particularly emphasising scholarship around the notion of the “other”. The term “other” constitutes a shared space for continental thought, theology, and a variety of psychological discourses. This phenomenon bears significantly on ethical, epistemological, and phenomenological scholarship in each of these fields.As an interdisciplinary conference, presentations will explore the rich discourses that have emerged around the concept of the “other” in various intellectual traditions, ranging from phenomenological work like that of Emmanuel Levinas to the work of John Zizioulas in theology or that of Jessica Benjamin in psychoanalysis. We invite psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, social workers, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, theologians, clergy, and graduate students of all persuasions to participate in this year’s event. Our hope is that our conversations and collaborations will challenge and deepen our various disciplines.”Now, THAT is mind candy for me. The thought of being with people to discuss these kinds of things, and to engage in the professional dialogue that opens space for the integration of psychology, philosophy, theology, and religious practice is too much to handle. I am bouncing with anticipation. You might be thinking, “He’s nuts; I can’t relate.” That’s okay. Mind candy is a relative thing.I also believe that there is an overlap between the cognitive or mental dimension of a person’s life and the spiritual dimension for that person.These both relate to the inward, immaterial aspect of a human being. What I think is related to my spirit; in some literature we think with our spirits.Paul said that he combined spiritual thoughts with spiritual words in his evangelistic and apologetic ministries. So, mind candy can be found in spiritual containers.In this regard, I find an intelligent sermon especially delightful. In order for it to work, the preacher has to start from scripture, relate to other scripture to connect up the dots of complex concepts, and then use adroit illustrations to apply the main idea in view. Humour does not hurt. Relating to the people to whom he or she is talking is also helpful so, actually looking at them is a must.As the new year really gets under way, I wish everyone lots of his or her own brand of candy. May 2011 be sweet.