Using the Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies to Decolonize Counseling Practice: The Important Roles of Theory,Power, and Action

The Multicultural and Social Justice Counseling Competencies (MSJCC; Ratts, Singh, Nassar-McMillan, Butler, & McCullough, 2015) ask counselors to “apply knowledge of multicultural and social justice theories” (p. 8). Counselors who implement the MSJCC in this manner have the opportunity to critically examine traditional counseling theories that were developed within a predominantly White and Western framework, that reproduce North American and European colonist ideology if not contextualized, and that neglect Indigenous approaches to healing (Tuck & Yang, 2012; Watkins & Shulman, 2008). In this article, the authors present 4 key multicultural and social justice theories that can support counselors in adopting a decolonizing paradigm and implementing the MSJCC in their practice with clients: relational-cultural theory (Miller, 1976), critical race theory (Bell, 1995), intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991), and liberation psychology (Martín-Baró, 1994).     

The Axes of Debt: A Preface to Three Essays

This is a preface to three essays on different aspects of ontological and economic debt as themes in religious ethics. It frames their contribution by arguing that debt is central to traditions of philosophical and religious ethics yet is woefully neglected as a thematic problem and problematic in contemporary iterations of these traditions. In order to situate debt as a central moral concern, it is argued that any consideration of debt must wrestle with how debt exists on two axes. One is the axis of ontological and economic debt. The other is the axis of debt as an expression of mutuality and debt as a mode of domination. These axes generate deep ambiguities regarding the moral status of debt. But contemporary religious and philosophical ethics struggles to articulate, let alone address, this ambiguity due to being wedded to modern conceptions of the autonomous subject. The essay closes by setting out the themes of the three essays, the connections between them, and how they can be a catalyst for further reflection on this vital but under‐researched topic.