Exploring the Pastoral Dynamics of Mixed-Race Persons

The number of persons in the United States who identify with more than one racial group is a steadily growing segment of the larger population. Yet pastoral care literature has not focused much attention to date on the spiritual care of multiracial people in America. This article intends to begin that conversation by examining their intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics, suggesting four directions of caring, and then exploring five implications for offering compassionate and relevant ministry.     

Understanding Hope. Persons in the Process of Dying

Changes both within the profession of psychoanalysis and in society as a whole have affected our psychoanalytic training programs and presented new ethical challenges. Whereas in earlier decades training programs needed to be concerned primarily about the inviolability of the training analysis and the choice of appropriate analytic candidates, today there is little support for psychoanalysis as a treatment modality. Institutes are experiencing greater competition in attracting quality candidates and in providing them with adequate training experiences. This strain encourages institutes to operate in unethical ways to attract candidates. On the other hand, within the profession itself we are experiencing much theoretical ferment and the increasing feminization of the profession. These changes are affecting our training institutes and our ethical values in both positive and negative ways.     

Inner Night and Inner Light: A Quaker Model of Pastoral Care for the Mentally Ill

The same theological principles that motivated Quakers in institutional reform work continue to influence uniquely Quaker approaches to pastoral care for the mentally ill today. This unity of psychological and spiritual care, inspired by George Fox, was first apparent in the work of the Religious Society of Friends asylum reforms in the nineteenth century. These principles matured during the early twentieth century as they entered into dialogue with Jung and Jungian psychology and continue to inspire Quaker pastoral care models today. This paper will examine how theological concepts affect the way Friends approach mental health care, historically and in contemporary times.     

Non-Speech Based Pastoral Care: A Pastoral Care Program for Aged Care Residents with Little or No Ability to Speak

SUMMARY

Pastoral care depends on the ability to communicate, most commonly through the medium of speech. The aged person who has suffered illness or accident that has adversely affected their speech, is in great need of pastoral care. Yet chaplains and pastoral carers can feel helpless in the face of such a significant deficit and may not know what to do. At Tregenza Avenue Aged Care Service, the Chaplaincy service has developed helpful individual programs for non-speech based pastoral care. Using visual and tactile symbols, pictures, touch, and music, we have been able to minister to people with a variety of speech problems, with promising results.     

A Caring Framework for Enhancing Couples Therapy

As couples move away from role oriented patterns of relating they enter a transitional phase where marital expectations are less clearly defined. Frequently couples seeking therapy complain of a lack of caring in their relationships. They also express confusion about the appropriateness of their desire for more caring. In this article the authors present a caring framework based on their research with couples in "vital-total" marriages. They also suggest several ways this caring framework can be used in clinical work with couples.     

Pastoral counseling with youth

Conclusion Young people need their pastor, not only as the preacher, or as the youth group leader, or as the energetic dynamo of congregational life, but as the one to whom they can go with their personal problems. They need a representative of the adult world with whom they can share and find in such sharing an incentive for developing their own identity. The pastor is in a unique position to be such a representative since he represents also the world of the Spirit.     

In the Shadow Side of Hope: Charisma and Mutuality in the Pastoral Care of Men with Tendencies Toward Affective Disturbance

This paper explores dialectical relationships between affective mental disturbance and religious development in men. It then proposes a form of pastoral engagement—the mutual encounter—with men so afflicted. In care giving, the pastor may draw on his or her own charismatic endowment to solicit the recognition of the same within the care seeker, all the while respecting a man’s attenuating psychosocial need for communicative boundaries and privacy. Both pastor and care seeker may engage the care process as a mutual, continuing, and dialogic quest for authentic Christian relationship, charisma, and selfhood where each serves as “guide” and “messenger.”

Raising Revenue for Persons with Disabilities

Whereas right-libertarians do not think that it is a requirement of justice that we raise revenues for persons with disabilities, both left-libertarians and liberal egalitarians think that there is such a requirement. An issue remains for the latter two theorists—how ought we to raise this revenue? Liberal egalitarians typically endorse either universal taxation or taxation of the wealthy. Left-libertarians, on the other hand, cannot so easily appeal to the methods of universal taxation and taxation of the wealthy, as they are illegitimately coercive. One such method left open to the left-libertarian is one proposed by Michael Otsuka. He argues that both left-libertarians and liberal egalitarians should find the method of taxation of the unjust to be a reasonably strong way of raising revenue. In this paper, I point out problems with Otsuka’s argument, as well as directly criticize the method of taxation of the unjust.     

Elegiac Poetry: A Pastoral Resource with Complicated Grief

This essay argues that elegiac poetry, the poetry of mourning, may be a resource for pastoral care with complicated grief. It builds on Freuds distinction between mourning (normal grief) and melancholia (complicated grief), particularly as appropriated by French literary critic and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. It makes the case for elegy as a locus for externalizing a lost object which, in complicated grief, has been internalized as part of the bereaved persons self and which is not only grieved but also treated ambivalently if it is not hated. Drawing on the suffering God motif in Christian theologies of the cross, theological reflections supplement psychological arguments.     

Memory Interventions for Persons with Dementia

It is possible to design effective, pragmatically useful memory interventions for persons with Dementia of the Alzheimer's Type (DAT). A review of successful memory interventions for such populations is presented. A particularly effective intervention technique, spaced-retrieval, is described and the theoretical basis for its effectiveness is discussed. A detailed account is presented of a spaced-retrieval intervention in which persons with DAT are trained to learn and utilize a strategy, i.e., remembering to use a calendar listing daily activities. Directions for future research in this area are offered.     

Pastoral counseling for homosexuals

Pastoral Psychology -     

Programs for Older Persons: A Compendium

This article provides helpful information for older persons desiring to find employment in the U.S. work force and thereby remain independent for as long as possible.     

Expanding the Psychological Imagination in Pastoral Theology: Using Novels to Better Understand Underrepresented Persons and Groups

This essay argues for the effectiveness of using novels to develop a more sophisticated pastoral imagination by discussing the unique contributions the novel can make to pastoral care and using Toni Morrison’s (1998) novel Paradise to demonstrate the power of the novel to expand the author’s own pastoral imagination. Themes the novel raises include the contextual nature of human experience; the value of cultural theories for deeper and more penetrating analyses of human experience than those provided by psychological theories alone; and the resources available among victims of oppression and abuse for communal healing. The essay concludes with a discussion of the lessons that novels and, in particular, Morrison’s Paradise, have to teach pastoral theologians.     

Pastoral communication with the confused

Three basic kinds of strategies can aid the pastor in communicting with a confused person: (1) focusing the person's attention, (2) fostering orientation to time, place, and person, (3) finding meaning in the person's experience. Despite the logical incongruities in the communications of a confused person, on a feeling level there is a basis of reality. To persist in the effort to communicate is to care on the deepest level.     

Listening to People with Dementia: A Pastoral Care Perspective

SUMMARY

Pastoral and Spiritual Care approaches to the reduction of depression in residential aged care facilities are considered. They are examined through specific one-to-one pastoral care, through a pastoral care person in the team approach to care and through a one-to-many relationship for group spiritual and religious activities. The suggestions in this article are offered as extensions to a manual, Challenge Depression, on managing depression in residential aged care as a way of including pastoral and spiritual care as part of an integrated approach and as part of a stand alone approach of pastoral care.