The Practice of Pastoral Care: A Postmodern Approach, rev. ed.
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
The Practice of Pastoral Care has become a popular seminary textbook for courses in pastoral care and a manual for clinical pastoral education. In it, Doehring encourages counselors to view their ministry through a trifocal lens that incorporates premodern, modern, and postmodern approaches to religious and psychological knowledge. Doehring describes the basic ingredients of a caregiving relationship, shows how to use the caregiver’s life experience as a source of authority, and demonstrates how to develop the skill of listening and establishing the actual relationship. This new edition elaborates on and expands the author’s previous work, adding an intercultural perspective that gives more attention to religious pluralism in the pastoral care setting. It offers a road map for using a step-by-step narrative, relational, embodied approach to spiritual care that respects the unique ways people live out their values and beliefs, especially in coping with stress, loss, and violence. Readers will be able to confidently and professionally offer pastoral care and counseling to members of their congregations or other places of ministry.
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- Offers a road map for using a step-by-step narrative, relational, embodied approach
- Focuses on an intercultural perspective that gives more attention to religious pluralism in the pastoral care setting
- Examines premodern, modern, and postmodern approaches
- Introducing an Intercultural Approach
- Intercultural Care: Trust and Theological Accountability
- Basic Ingredients of Caregiving Relationships
- Embodied Listening
- Establishing a Caregiving Relationship
- Theological Themes and Reflexivity
- Narrative Themes of Loss, Violence, and Coping
- Systemic Assessment
- Planning Care: Liberative Spiritual Integration
In this revised and expanded edition of her extensively read text, The Practice of Pastoral Care, Professor Carrie Doehring offers a clear and insightful explanation of intercultural pastoral and spiritual care. The books lucid prose makes it accessible for beginning students who are taking introductory courses. At the same time, Doehring’s richly nuanced conversation with current literature in the field makes the book an indispensable resource for seasoned scholars. Doehring unpacks the meaning of spirituality in lived experience, using examples and diagrams and making reference to stories and films that help the reader understand the intersection of psychological, cultural, and theological dimensions of pastoral and spiritual care. She emphasizes the values of respect and compassion and teaches us how to embody these values in caregiving conversations and interactions. This is an eminently practical and wise guide for those learning to offer life-giving care.
—Mary Clark Moschella, Roger J. Squire Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling, Yale Divinity School
In this revised and expanded edition, Carrie Doehring makes another remarkable contribution to pastoral theology and to contemporary practices of pastoral care. Using a narrative approach, she provides rich interdisciplinary and current resources for engaging the complex and intersecting differences that shape contexts for care as well as the embodied relationality of those who give and receive such care. Her experienced skill as a teacher shapes each chapter accessibly. Doehring artfully demonstrates the practice of intercultural care as a theologically reflective and co-creative process that seeks spiritual integration and relational justice.
—Nancy J. Ramsay, Professor of Pastoral Theology and Pastoral Care, Brite Divinity School
A carefully constructed and nuanced articulation of the essential features and dynamic operations of pastoral and spiritual care. Whilst not neglecting historic resources, Doehring helps situate the practice of care squarely in contemporary postmodern and pluralist settings drawing on narrative, intercultural and theological engagements with the complex exigencies of human experience. Spiritual caregivers of all kinds must have, read and digest this book.
—Emmanuel Y. Lartey, L. Bevel Jones III Professor of Pastoral Theology, Care, and Counseling, Candler School of Theology, Emory University