As the global marketplace grows and becomes more complex, increasing stress is placed upon employees. Businesses are acknowledging this change in work habits by adapting the work place to offer support through multifaith chaplaincy. Multifaith chaplaincy is based on developing relationships of trust between diverse faith communities and the public workplace. Through the experience of starting the first multifaith chaplaincy in Canary Wharf, the author offers insights into current conditions and challenges of chaplaincy in the business community. Writing as an Anglican priest, Fiona Stewart-Darling shows the importance of chaplaincy teams drawing on different faith traditions. This book is an important contribution to the emerging debate around the role of chaplaincy in faith and business communities. This research will be of particular interest to those working in or setting up chaplaincies in different contexts such as hospitals, prisons, town centre chaplaincies working with businesses and business leaders, particularly those involved in diversity and inclusion in the workplace.

Making the case for the relevance of pastoral care today, this book explores the role of pastoral care through the prism of music. Using musical analogies, the author provides a new way of understanding and practising pastoral care, grounded in practical theology. Challenging overemphasis on mission, he shows that pastoral care remains essential to the life of the church, especially when engaging with extreme situations such as dying, suffering or war, and considers the role of pastoral carers in the specific pastoral encounter and in the life of the church in general.

In the work of spiritual direction, certain themes or 'presenting issues' commonly arise. Listening to Your Soul considers thirty frequently presenting subjects and offers tools for exploring and understanding the reality that lies behind them, from an experienced spiritual director. Subjects include discernment, change, goals, choices, hopes, family issues, parenting, regret, anger, doubt, perseverance, work, prayer - or lack of, disappointment, possessions, guilt, fear, endings and more. For each area, Listening to Your Soul explores the way the theme tends to arise in spiritual direction - what are the questions, feelings, dilemmas which we may experience and encounter? - offering reflective questions, exercises and prayers to deepen understanding and discern God in the questions and uncertainty.

This volume is intended to promote academic and public understanding of the different positions that exist on the issues of sexual orientation and civil rights protections for gays and lesbians within the major American religious traditions. Writers from the Jewish, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, and African-American churches explore the history and tradition of their communities on same-sex orientation, discuss the moral stance they advocate, and consider the legal and public policy implications of that stance.

The contributors, who each work with spiritual issues, either explicitly as spiritual directors or accompaniers, or as an implicit part of their therapeutic work, offer a psychologically-informed approach to Spiritual Accompaniment and Direction, and to working with others on a spiritual level more generally. They explore what it means to be attuned to the spiritual process of another, discuss what makes an effective relationship in Spiritual Accompaniment and counselling, and consider how best to work with spiritual crisis, spiritual abuse, and pain. The unconscious process informing the work, forgiveness, changing spiritual needs over the life-span, and models of supervision that can inform the practice of Spiritual Accompaniment are also explored. A case study is presented, providing psychological and theological insights into the accompaniment process. Grounded in work with the spiritual dimension of others and aspiring to improve encounters at a spiritual level, this concise book has important implications for the practice of counsellors, psychotherapists, and spiritual accompaniers and directors.

Venturing into "impossible" territory once again with Christian Satanism, this book provides its reader with the option to be both as only real wisdom could allow.

On January 29, 2001, President George W. Bush signed an executive order creating the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. This action marked a key step toward institutionalizing an idea that emerged in the mid-1990s under the Clinton administration--the transfer of some social programs from government control to religious organizations. However, despite an increasingly vocal, ideologically charged national debate--a debate centered on such questions as: What are these organizations doing? How well are they doing it? Should they be supported with tax dollars?--solid answers have been few.

"In Saving America?" Robert Wuthnow provides a wealth of up-to-date information whose absence, until now, has hindered the pursuit of answers. Assembling and analyzing new evidence from research he and others have conducted, he reveals what social support faith-based agencies are capable of providing. Among the many questions he addresses: Are congregations effective vehicles for providing broad-based social programs, or are they best at supporting their own members? How many local congregations have formal programs to assist needy families? How much money do such programs represent? How many specialized faith-based service agencies are there, and which are most effective? Are religious organizations promoting trust, love, and compassion?

The answers that emerge demonstrate that American religion is helping needy families and that it is, more broadly, fostering civil society. Yet religion alone cannot save America from the broad problems it faces in providing social services to those who need them most.

Elegantly written, "Saving America?" represents an authoritative and evenhanded benchmark of information for the current--and the coming--debate.

Much has been written on the relationship between violence and religious militancy, but there has been less research on constructive methods of confronting religious violence. This book represents an innovative attempt to integrate the study of religion with the study of conflict resolution. Marc Gopin offers an analysis of contemporary religious violence as a reaction to the pressures of modernity and the increasing economic integration of the world. He contends that religion is one of the most salient phenomena that will cause massive violence in the next century. He also argues, however, that religion can play a critical role in constructing a global community of shared moral commitments and vision - a community that can limit conflict to its nonviolent, constructive variety.