ACU professor to speak at East Side Church of Christ

Dr. Richard Beck, a professor and chairman of the department of psychology at Abilene Christian University, will be the guest speaker during the Sunday services at East Side Church of Christ.
Beck will speak at 9:30 a.m., 10:25 a.m. and 1 p.m., following a potluck lunch. The public is invited to attend one of the events.
Beck is the author of several books, including Unclean, The Authenticity of Faith and The Slavery of Death. His research also covers topics as diverse as the psychology of profanity and why Christian bookstore art is so bad.
Beck, who leads a weekly Bible study at the French-Robertson Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, writes a blog about the theology of Johnny Cash, the demonology of Scooby-Doo and his latest Bible class on monsters.
“As a college professor teaching young people who aren’t always interested in what you’re teaching them, I’ve gotten into the habit of always looking for off-beat or quirky connections with my lecture material,” he said. “Music, comics, movies, TV shows — anything that might spark some interest. While I don’t teach Bible or theology at ACU, that habit of looking for a quirky connection carries over into all my teaching, even for church audiences. So I’ve used Johnny Cash, Scooby Doo and Calvin and Hobbes to teach Bible lessons. My next project is a Bible class about pirates.”
On Sunday, Beck will focus on his book Unclean, which focuses on the psychology of disgust.
“The psychology of disgust is how we emotionally react to and judge something, generally food, as being polluted or contaminated,” he said. “What’s interesting and potentially problematic about the psychology of disgust is how it gets projected onto people, where we come to judge certain groups as being ‘unclean.’ We all do this, saying that someone we don’t like is icky, creepy, revolting or disgusting. And what happens when we do this is that we push these people away. But if you’re a Christian, that’s a problem because over and over in the Bible we see Jesus welcoming and befriending the unclean people of his day.”