Category: Pastoral Care/Theology

This is a full scale disciplinary framework for pastoral psychotherapists/pastoral counselors at intermediate and advanced levels of clinical training and also for experienced pastoral counselors and psychotherapists in professional practice. It harvests the great potential of postmodern sensibilities to help, accompany, and support individuals, couples, and families in recognizing and healing especially painful psychic wounds, and/or longstanding patterns of self-defeating relationships to self and others.

In this groundbreaking book Pamela Cooper-White offers a new relational paradigm for pastoral assessment and theological reflection. She uses the caregiver’s own responses and feelings as a primary instrument for deepening discernment and better care. She innovatively combines postmodern, psychoanalytic, and theological perspectives with illuminating case studies to illustrate this new use of the self in pastoral care, counseling, and psychotherapy.

In this comprehensive, practical, and gripping assessment of various forms of violence against women, Pamela Cooper-White challenges the Christian churches to examine their own responses to the cry of Tamar in our time. She describes specific forms of such violence and outlines appropriate pastoral responses.

Holt-Woehl seeks to discover common characteristics of congregations that are accepting, welcoming, and supporting of people with mental illness. The work includes a literature review on congregations and mental illness as well as a study of six congregations. The author discovered a common view, in each congregation, that every person is a child of God and gifted by God whether or not they have mental illness.

Drawing on a range of practical concerns and issues in worship life and pastoral care, Elaine Ramshaw shows how ritual can communicate care, and be shaped by care for the individual, society, and the world.

This book explains how racism, economic disadvantage, and the operation of distinctive African American beliefs, practices, and institutions impact the grief process. The narratives of this qualitative research project of African American individuals who have experienced the loss of a loved one suggest that traditional understandings of the bereavement are insufficient to explain African Americans‘ unique experience of loss.

The author describes the theological reflections of participants in response to the question how they thought their congregation came to be accepting, welcoming, and supporting of diversity or those with chronic mental illness. Themes include the priesthood of all believers/body of Christ, Holy Communion as a “Welcome Table” for all people, grace/gospel preaching, the theology of the cross, and simultaneously saint and sinner.

This article explores how racism is incorporated into narratives about a deceased family member. This qualitative research study reports on interviews of 26 African American about the life experience of deceased family members. Almost all the individuals interviewed talked about the ways the decease taught them to deal with racism. Findings suggest that a view of African American grief that is insensitive to racism in the African American experience may lead to unhelpful grief support or counseling.