The author refutes some assumed grief counseling through his own grief. Longtime grief, especially for a close family member, is more normal than assumed and has its value.
It isn’t true that the loss of any single thing will destroy us. Everything in life has some value and life is full of valuable things, things worth living for, things worth doing, things worth becoming, things worth loving again.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Prof. Oden offers a critique of contemporary pastoral counseling that notes the advantages of modern clinical psychotherapy while pointing out its limitations for pastoral counseling which he asserts has all but ignored the classical Christian pastoral tradition exemplified in the work of Gregory of Nazianzus.
The author deals with our feelings when confronted with a situation in which we want to care but find it difficult or almost impossible. She offers suggestions for how one can deal with those feelings in ways that show care for both self and others.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Thirty-three authorities, representing both the clergy and professionals active in mental health programs, respond to the challenge to church and temple made by the community mental health revolution.
Those who sin and who harm others must be confronted with their deeds so that they might repent. Therefore, confidentiality should not be regarded as a sacred cow. The need for mandatory reporting and the need for pastoral confidentiality may not be as contradictory as they at first appear.
What determines whether a communication is confidential? That is a pastoral as we as a legal question. Although it’s awkward, sometimes it is necessary to explain to a parishioner that every disclosure cannot be treated as confidential.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A survey of current psychotherapy methods, including very helpful summaries of the views of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Ottor Rank, Eric Fromm, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan, Carl Jung, and Carl Rogers, as well as behavioral, transactional, gestalt and other therapies.
(ENTIRE BOOK) This book is not primarily about counseling theory and technique. Rather, it is an attempt to describe the important connection between good counseling and consciousness raising.
The recovery of the type of evangelism practiced in the third century, adapted to 20th-century circumstances, could meet the evangelistic needs of the mainline church.
Drawing on his experience of nearly a half century of ministry - much of it connected with retreats - Raines gives a rationale for the offering of retreat experiences to clergy for purposes of sanctuary, nourishment, study, silence, healing and encouragement.
Grief is a helplessness that does not cry for help. One cries -- and hopes that help will come unbidden. Consolation is an art. It is the art of active love.
The author deals with turning destructive conflict into a constructive experience for change and growth.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Dr. Clinebell provides practical suggestions and programs to make good marriages better, to turn crises into opportunities for growth, and to activate congregations of faith as communities of caring.
(ENTIRE BOOK) You have more going for you than you think you do -- probably lots more! Here are tools for discovering and using the rich potentialities of the mid-years, for personal renewal and for the enlivening of marriage. The author states that this book grew out of his own struggles and his experiences in enriching mid-years marriages, including his own.
(ENTIRE BOOK) This handbook addresses marriage and family enrichment, creative singlehood, human liberation, youth work and social change. These qualities of the human potential movement are brought together in a concise, clear and comprehensive way.
Reviews of two pioneering studies into patterns of marriage and divorce in American society.
Some commentators on nuclear arms miss the mark. The author discusses such arguments as "nuclear madness," "death wishes" "the wrath of God," and the like. We must intervene in the cultural subconscious not just to understand but to change it.
Increasingly, pastoral counseling centers are more like churches than like mental-health clinics. They are extensions of a central function of the church -- the preaching of the Word and administration of the sacraments.
The author describes the experience of being an assistant chaplain in a New York hospital for mental and physical illnesses.
Mentally disturbed persons need a simple, step-by-step method to move from where they are toward health, community and usefulness: first, to tell others the truth about themselves, and second, to list the people they have harmed and make amends wherever possible. Then they have an obligation to work with others seeking the same help, insuring their own recovery.
American society is driven by competitive economic forces that cheapen and exploit the personal dimensions of human relations and community life. Our major academic and religious institutions must support disciplines of inquiry into the nature and practice of care-giving, and into the human needs and problems that prompt this care.
The jogger who says ‘I’m going to run till I die’ is seeking to still a peculiarly modern angst. The church must try to deal specifically with the environments of the terminally ill and the terminally aged. As hospices make their way into abandoned maternity and pediatrics wings of local hospitals, churches can push for their acceptance and church people can serve on boards of directors and aid in ministering to dying patients and their families.
Fasting, prayer and meditation blend easily together and improve the author's ability to pray “Thy will be done” with wholehearted commitment. Proponents of fasting say that this discipline is an effective means of improving one’s mental, physical and spiritual health.
The role of intimacy in marriage. Includes practical steps for group discussion.
(ENTIRE BOOK) Mental health is a central and inescapable concern for any local church that is a healing-redemptive fellowship. A local church today has an unprecedented opportunity to multiply its contributions to both the prevention and the therapeutic dimensions of mental health. A church can seize this opportunity most effectively by allowing mental health to become a leavening concern, permeating all areas of its life.
(ENTIRE BOOK) A theologian’s perspective on the issues involved in the pastoral task.
A review of approaches to mental health care in the last couple of centuries. Every step forward in the health care has usually been followed, sooner rather than later, by at least a half-step backward.
In these last years scarred by AIDS, by the dominant culture of greed and violence, and by personal loss and pain, the author has come to see more distinctly the vital link between the healing process (traditionally the prerogative of religious and medical traditions) and the work of liberation (assumed to be the business of revolutionary movements for justice).
The popular works of Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls and Eric Berne are being embraced as major therapeutic systems, useful in pastoral-care work, but these thearapies, although popular, are demonstrably inadequate. They are no more scientific, or validated, than Emile Coué or Dianetics.
(ENTIRE BOOK) This book is written for the person, professional or lay, who wishes to apply religious resources more effectively to the problem of alcoholism. It deals with what to teach concerning alcoholism and how to handle the alcoholic who comes seeking counsel.