Promoting patient safety: implications for pastoral care

This article provides an overview of current issues in patient safety, the subject of recently-implemented JCAHO standards, with attention to issues of special interest to pastoral care professionals and Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) students. Case studies of patient safety initiatives in two health care systems are used to illustrate the relationship between institutional core values and the just treatment of injured patients and their families, and to suggest opportunities for chaplains to contribute to patient safety efforts in their institutions. A list of suggested readings and online resources is included.     

Therapy talk and therapeutic conversations: the formation of pastoral counselors

The article demonstrates a process analysis for therapeutic conversations, highlighting four styles of therapeutic communication and its relational patterns, and illustrates the use of two educational tools in learning the languages of therapy that shape therapeutic conversations.     

Black milk: literary resources for learning pastoral care

The author details ways of utilizing literary resources in learning pastoral care and provides specific references that can be used to illustrate a variety of topics frequently encountered by pastoral caregivers.     

Transcultural hospital pastoral care

Transcultural hospital pastoral care's subjects, the immigrant and the refugee, are described. Differences and similarities are noted. Three difficulties—culture shock, prejudice, and ethnocentrism—are followed by principles of transcultural hospital pastoral care, the significance of hospitalization, and a case history.The Rev. David G. Hawkins, B.A., S.T.M., D. Rel., R.S.W., St. George's Anglican Church in Vancouver, is a chaplain at Vancouver General Hospital.     

Incarnation and pastoral care

This essay is an examination of the usefulness of incarnation as a theological metaphor for pastoral care and counseling. Understanding the incarnation as both an event and as a paradigm of God's relationship to the world provides a theological perspective for examining four interrelated questions about identity and the helping relationship frequently asked by the pastoral care-giver. The incarnation metaphor finally frees us to care in the confidence that in God the Incarnating One, all things, including our care for the sick, are held together.Dr. Anderson is Associate Professor of Pastoral Theology and Counseling at Wartburg Theological Seminary, 333 Wartburg Place, Dubuque, Iowa 52001.     

Phenomenology and pastoral care

The author discusses phenomenology as a potential resource for pastoral care generally and then illustrates its implications in two specific areas of pastoral care. After a brief discussion of the development of phenomenology, he defines pastoral care and identifies its methodological problem. Phenomenology, it is argued, offers potentially helpful methods and interpretative categories in its attitude, its attempts at self-aware, ordered discernment, and its anthropology. It serves to militate against the temptation in pastoral care to understand human problems in terms of individual and social pathology, in the case of individuals, and to illumine the ways the community functions as a dimension of pastoral care.He is the author ofEcclesial Man.     

The anthropology of Carl Jung: Implications for pastoral care

This article examines the basic tenets of Carl Jung's anthropology, including intrapsychic structure, relationships, society, and the process of individuation. It then turns to his ideas about God and religion. Jung builds his understanding of God from his work in psychology, and because of that method, there are several major problems with his theologizing. Nevertheless, his insights are extremely valuable to the field of pastoral care, and ministers would do very well to appreciate his contribution, though always with a critical eye to its limitation.