Book 18 or 2016 -- The Practice of Pastoral Care

The Practice of Pastoral Care: A Postmodern Approach

Carrie Doehring (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press) 184 Pages

From the Chapters web site...

Drawing upon psychological, theological, and cultural studies on suffering, Carrie Doehring has developed an approach to religiously based care for clergy and caregivers who take a postmodern, or social-constructionist, approach to knowledge. Encouraging counselors to view their ministry through trifocal lenses that include approaches that are premodern (where God can be apprehended through religious rituals and traditions), modern (where rational and empirical sources are consulted), and postmodern (where the provisional and contextual nature of knowledge is realized), Doehring shows how pastoral caregivers can draw upon all of the historical and contemporary resources of their religious, intellectual, and cultural traditions...Utilizing case studies, offering student exercises, and concluding with an in depth look at a family situation in the novel Affliction to demonstrate her method, The Practice of Pastoral Care is accessibly written for students yet thought-provoking for seasoned caregivers. (https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/the-practice-of-pastoral-care/9780664226848-item.html?ikwid=doehring&ikwsec=Home&ikwidx=1 accessed August 10, 2016)

This is an easy read. It is also a very good read. It is the sort of book I wish we had been assigned when I was in seminary and I was trying to grapple with what Pastoral Care is and how it is done. [Though to be fair it likely would not have been as useful to me at that time since I was a less than stellar student in my first two years and also had not done a lot of work on my own issues – to the extent that I was unaware how those issues got (and still get at times) in my way.] I found the theory fascinating and helpful and at the same time the use of case studies/examples helped make it a much more practical book.

The piece that is missing is the “ordinary time” visits. As with much Pastoral Care writing I have read this volume focuses on the visiting in a time of crisis. And that is valuable, indeed there were many things I thought “I should do more of that” as I was reading. But one of the pieces I find more challenging is the visiting when there is no obvious reason for the visit, the more social visits. That is what I am really wanting to explore. And those are the visits I need to make roe of – largely because they lay the base for when the crisis arises.