The Practice of Pastoral Care, Revised and Expanded Edition

A Postmodern Approach

By: Carrie Doehring

Narrated by: Nan McNamara

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. Listeners will be able to confidently and professionally offer pastoral care and counseling to members of their congregations or other places of ministry.

©2006, 2015 Carrie Doehring (P)2020 Tantor

Basic overview of concepts with many opinions

Great resource for framing concepts which can only be learned through practice. Personally, I felt there was a hard slant to the left in terms of political undertones. Additionally, spiritual care isn't always about offering comfort care like this book suggests it should be. The author seems to beleive that any sense of self denial or sacrifice for one's beliefs is a result of a broken faith designed for someone else to gain control or power. Faith traditions are more diverse than what is discussed in this book and to honor and respect those traditions as well is the whole of pastoral/spiritual care.

Ideologically possessed and unfounded.

The author provides shallow and uninformed solutions to complex problems using trending ideas and terminology that are not founded on informed and empirical studies.

Not useful

This is not "Christian" pastoral care. It is utterly sodden in leftist, Marxist, relativistic identity politics. Even if the politics were tolerable, the content is largely devoid of applicable guidance. In the author's defense, the aim of this work is more theory than manual. I suspect that most Christian pastors who are seeking a general overview of pastoral care are looking for something else.