Pam King is back, and this conversation moved at the pace it wanted to. She runs the Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary, and the framework she has built there is the most useful integration of psychological science and Christian theology I have come across — six facets that spell THRIVE, with a telos she calls the reciprocating self. We started with Stanford and seminary and ended with how the church is asking nine-year-olds to defend their interpretation of Torah when what they actually need is a fifth adult who knows their name. In between: the difference between flourishing and thriving, the Altadena fires Pam watched from her office window, how Winnicott’s good enough mother maps onto how children come to relate to God, what Mark Labberton’s seminary depression taught him about liturgy, why I rebuilt our confirmation class around questions instead of doctrines, and the prayer I have been praying with my daughter Khora since she was an infant. You can check out her previous visit on the podcast here.

Highlights from the conversation

Thriving is climate. Flourishing is weather. Pam’s preferred frame: flourishing, as positive psychology has used it, has flattened into individual life-satisfaction — a state, a feeling. Thriving, from developmental science, has reciprocity built in and assumes you can be growing even when nothing feels good. The example she lives: the Altadena fires she watched from her office window last year, her neighbors’ homes burning. Thriving through catastrophe is the whole point of the distinction.
The THRIVE Spiritual Health Framework. Six facets Pam has built at the Thrive Center at Fuller — Transcendence, Habits and rhythms, Relationships and community, Identity and narrative, Vocation and purpose, Ethics and virtue. Six points, not three. Sorry, Presbyterians.
The reciprocating self. Pam’s telos, and the title of her foundational book with Jack Balswick and Kevin Reimer. We are created in the image of a relational God to become particular, unique persons in unity and reciprocal relationship with others. Not the individuated self of late modernity. Not the self-sealing tribal self of self-sorted communities. The reciprocating self. Practices and community should be evaluated by whether they form one.
“Good is a four-letter word.” Pam’s resistance to easy definitions of the good life — and why holding paradox is the survival skill of faith development in late modernity. Tripp pushes on the cultural default that the only narrative of the good life we still share is “doing well enough to retire,” and Pam pushes back with five-letter words: love, brought into community, embodied across practices.
“Good enough” parenting and how children come to relate to God. Winnicott’s good-enough mother. The attachment template formed in early childhood and how it maps onto adult experience of God. Pam’s pastoral move for first-time parents: bring your whole self, mirror your child, welcome the questions, and find five adults who will know your kid by name. The Bill Damon research that became Sticky Faith.
What liturgy did for Mark Labberton. Pam tells the story of the former Fuller president, then a seminary student going through depression, who could not grasp his beliefs cognitively — but whose participation in the kneeling, standing, and praying at All Saints did the work his mind could not. Forms hold us when belief evaporates. Tripp closes with the Khora prayer he has been saying with his daughter since she was an infant, and the night she stayed awake to make sure he prayed it.

About our guest

Dr. Pamela Ebstyne King is the Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at the School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy at Fuller Theological Seminary, and Executive Director of the Thrive Center for Human Development. An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), she completed her undergraduate and postdoctoral work at Stanford University (her postdoc supervisor was Bill Damon, who shows up in this conversation) and earned her MDiv and PhD at Fuller. She has served as a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and sits on the advisory board of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture. Pam hosts the With & For podcast at the Thrive Center, where all of the THRIVE Spiritual Health Framework resources we discussed are freely available.

Books we touched on:

The Reciprocating Self: Human Development in Theological Perspective, with Jack O. Balswick and Kevin S. Reimer. Her foundational telos book.
Thriving with Stone Age Minds: Evolutionary Psychology, Christian Faith, and the Quest for Human Flourishing, with Justin L. Barrett.
The Handbook of Spiritual Development in Childhood and Adolescence.

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