Narrative Therapy is an approach to counseling and community work that is having increasing influence in the helping field internationally. As well, the concept of narrative has become increasingly utilized in therapy, spirituality, organizational psychology and theology. This text is written for counseling practitioners, psychologists, pastors, social workers and chaplains who desire to integrate spirituality in their professional practice. The book presents a conversation between Christian spirituality and Narrative ideas demonstrating the effectiveness of Narrative Therapy in transformational work. The book is edited by two lecturer/practitioners who both lead counselor education faculties. Other contributors to the book are lecturers and therapists who are integrating these ideas in their practice in the counseling room and the classroom. Philosophical difficulties are discussed and practical applications are offered for using Narrative Therapy in a range of contexts.

Carole Fontaine, well known among biblical scholars for her feminist studies in the biblical wisdom traditions and the ancient Near East, is also a human rights and interfaith activist working on issues of violence against Muslim women in the Middle East and Southern Asia and a board member of many agencies such as the International Network for the Rights of Female Victims of Violence in Pakistan, and the Women's Forum against Fundamentalism in Iran. In this collection of her essays, mostly previously unpublished, she brings together these two concerns, distilling from the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam valuable insights into current questions of human rights. Unlike many writers, Fontaine recognizes the critical role of gender in the fundamental concept of the 'Other', so determinative for our view of humanity. In our days, Fontaine argues, human rights issues have taken on a new dimension in political discourse about war, peace and terror, where often an appeal is made to religious and scriptural justifications for the violation or preservation of rights. Fontaine urges attention to the priority of the sufferer in adjudicating meaning, and turns to the 'little texts' of daily ethics rather than grand theological abstractions in order to place 'scriptures' in meaningful conversation with the concrete realities of our world.

Carole Fontaine, well known among biblical scholars for her feminist studies in the biblical wisdom traditions and the ancient Near East, is also a human rights and interfaith activist working on issues of violence against Muslim women in the Middle East and Southern Asia and a board member of many agencies such as the International Network for the Rights of Female Victims of Violence in Pakistan, and the Women's Forum against Fundamentalism in Iran. In this collection of her essays, mostly previously unpublished, she brings together these two concerns, distilling from the scriptures of Judaism, Christianity and Islam valuable insights into current questions of human rights. Unlike many writers, Fontaine recognizes the critical role of gender in the fundamental concept of the 'Other', so determinative for our view of humanity. In our days, Fontaine argues, human rights issues have taken on a new dimension in political discourse about war, peace and terror, where often an appeal is made to religious and scriptural justifications for the violation or preservation of rights. Fontaine urges attention to the priority of the sufferer in adjudicating meaning, and turns to the 'little texts' of daily ethics rather than grand theological abstractions in order to place 'scriptures' in meaningful conversation with the concrete realities of our world.

Much more than a particular period in world history, modernity has fundamentally transformed how we think and live, and especially how we understand and relate to religious traditions. As the 'ghetto walls' have fallen, both empirically and metaphorically, Judaism is compelled to compete in an open marketplace of ideas. Jews can no longer count on an assumedly necessary Jewish identity or commitment, nor on the rallying force of anti-Semitism to ensure an individual and collective sense of belonging. Rather Jewish moral, spiritual and historical values and ideas must be read with new eyes and challenged to address modernity's proliferating array of questions and realities. The pertinent questions modern Jewry faces are how to embrace modernity as Jews and what such an embrace means for the meaning and future of Jewish life. This collection of essays, authored by scholars of the Shalom Hartman Institute, addresses three critical challenges posed to Judaism by modernity: the challenge of ideas, the challenge of diversity, and the challenge of statehood, and provides insights and ideas for the future direction of Judaism. Providing readers with new insights into Judaism and the Jewish people in contemporary times, the collection explores a wide range of issues that includes: the significance of Israel for the future of Judaism; the Jewish people as a people; the relationship between monotheism and violence; revelation and ethics; Judaism and the feminist challenge; and Judaism and homosexuality.

Men simply DO NOT understand marriage or the true roles of married couples and their destiny This book is one of the best (and cheapest) ways to discover the secrets of a happy lifelong marriage. A page turner, it deals with the current dilemmas of cohabitation, divorce, abortion, gay lifestyle, and same sex marriage. By unraveling the hidden secrets of cleaving it adds power to any marriage. Revealed are seven key words that can stop divorce in its tracks and nail the door shut on abortion and same sex marriage. This is a book of understanding, wisdom, love, and passion with life enhancing strategies based upon the scriptures. It includes many of the author's life experiences as a cowboy, engineer, and business man during two marriages lasting over 50 years producing five children and 11 grandchildren. A MUST READ book before any man or woman even thinks of getting married.

Help Overcoming Painful Experiences (H.O.P.E.) is a non-profit organization that both cultivates and promotes the value of spiritual and emotional health from a Biblical perspective. Our mission is to provide a safe place to work through the emotional issues that hinder us from fully embracing God, others, and life with enthusiasm.

To accomplish our mission, H.O.P.E. was designed to help people 1) overcome emotional pain from a variety of issues, 2) build a safe and healthy support network, 3) comprehend the truths about God in the midst of pain while exposing and replacing lies and 4) experience a life transformation through the healing power of Jesus Christ. In essence, we resurrect hope.

Our support and recovery model consists of three levels. Names of H.O.P.E. is used during Level 2 and centers on names of God that connect with and meet the needs encountered while going through painful experiences in life. Each lesson relates one of God's names to the truth of His character and shows how He alone can provide what is needed on the journey to emotional and spiritual wholeness and healing.

Drawing from principles and analogies in mathematics, chemistry, physics, and sports fitness training, Dr. Cosenza offers a bold and time-honored spiritual direction for shifting our values so as to maximize valor and resilience. This book is a carefully researched guide for personal and professional growth that systematically helps us to move away from a crisis to healthy and valiant living. On a 25-year quest for the meaning of "selfvalue," the author/psychologist unveils the biblical origin and characteristics of "spiritual valueness." Describing crises as imbalances of spiritual values, Dr. Cosenza explains types and subtypes of spiritual crises so that we can overcome life's pressuring circumstances. A step-wise spiritual fitness training model is presented that employs biblically based balance exercises to prevent, evaluate, and correct specific critical conditions. This unique form of spiritual fitness has major applications for individuals in need as well as spiritual leaders, mental health professionals, and health fitness trainers.

Coming Out From Voices of Guilt & Shame is about setting captives free. Physical and mental captivity that result from the three-headed monster known as abuse are identified by seven characters or conditions. The three heads of the abusive monster are, physical, sexual, and emotional. The seven characters or conditions give rise to personalities and generational curses. These personalities and curses of rebellion, pride, rejection, depression, entanglement, rage, and confusion about redemption, are the furnishings that decorate our lives and behaviors.

Much more than a particular period in world history, modernity has fundamentally transformed how we think and live, and especially how we understand and relate to religious traditions. As the 'ghetto walls' have fallen, both empirically and metaphorically, Judaism is compelled to compete in an open marketplace of ideas. Jews can no longer count on an assumedly necessary Jewish identity or commitment, nor on the rallying force of anti-Semitism to ensure an individual and collective sense of belonging. Rather Jewish moral, spiritual and historical values and ideas must be read with new eyes and challenged to address modernity's proliferating array of questions and realities. The pertinent questions modern Jewry faces are how to embrace modernity as Jews and what such an embrace means for the meaning and future of Jewish life. This collection of essays, authored by scholars of the Shalom Hartman Institute, addresses three critical challenges posed to Judaism by modernity: the challenge of ideas, the challenge of diversity, and the challenge of statehood, and provides insights and ideas for the future direction of Judaism. Providing readers with new insights into Judaism and the Jewish people in contemporary times, the collection explores a wide range of issues that includes: the significance of Israel for the future of Judaism; the Jewish people as a people; the relationship between monotheism and violence; revelation and ethics; Judaism and the feminist challenge; and Judaism and homosexuality.

The volume will provide a coherent critical examination of current issues related to the religious roots of contemporary, i.e. post-1990 European identity, by analyzing the components of contemporary European identity, the presence of religion in the development of national identities, manifestation of religious roots in secular society, and the role of religion in further European integration and social inclusion. The publication will involve a multi and interdisciplinary approach to the theme, by bringing together scholars in history, religious studies, sociology, cultural studies, European studies, and international relations. The rigorously edited volume will provide a coherent analysis of the religious roots of Europe's identity today, with particular attention to the secular context of religious communities. Europe is often perceived as secular by most of its citizens, regardless of their creed. Bearing this in mind, the authors will build upon their expertise in different fields of arts and humanities to identify some of the key elements of European religious heritage and its manifestation in Europe's identity, be it secular or otherwise perceived. The authors will also indicate the role that these elements play in further European integration. With the focused approach, the publication will identify a number of similarities across faiths and, more holistically, vis-a-vis Europe. This will serve the readers to perceive their own identity in a wider context of shared values, reaching beyond a particular faith or non-religious framework.

Help Overcoming Painful Experiences (H.O.P.E.) is a non-profit organization that both cultivates and promotes the value of spiritual and emotional health from a Biblical perspective. Our mission is to provide a safe place to work through the emotional issues that hinder us from fully embracing God, others, and life with enthusiasm.

To accomplish our mission, H.O.P.E. was designed to help people 1) overcome emotional pain from a variety of issues, 2) build a safe and healthy support network, 3) comprehend the truths about God in the midst of pain while exposing and replacing lies and 4) experience a life transformation through the healing power of Jesus Christ. In essence, we resurrect hope.

Our support and recovery model consists of three levels. "Doorway to H.O.P.E." is used during Level 1 as the entry point into our program and focuses on Three Truths About Life. These truths are used to encourage a commitment to the journey to emotional and spiritual wholeness and healing. "Doorway to H.O.P.E." exposes needs, tears down barriers to making healthy changes and "wets appetites" for experiencing God's transformational power.

In this latest edition of Dr. DeKoven's book Marriage and Family Life, the principles from the Word of God, necessary to have an effective and God pleasing family are presented with humor and grace. Perfect marriages do not exist, but healthy ones can if one can apply the word of God with wisdom to the practical issues of family life. This comprehensive book will help the reader find practical wisdom and help for troubled times, will provide the pastor or counselor materials for pre-marital counseling, and for the Christian counselor, strong theological and psychological principles to help the troubled home.

Nature plays an important and often neglected role in Jewish apocalypses. Most Second Temple Jewish apocalypses (ca. 200 BC - AD 100) do not oppose the material world, but view nature as damaged by human and angelic sin. Rather than expecting God to destroy the world, many look forward to God's dramatic eschatological deliverance of nature from corruption. Although Romans 8:19-22 was not written in the genre of an apocalypse, it shares the basic apocalyptic world view. The Apostle Paul follows that stream of apocalyptic thought that looks forward to the transformation of creation by an eschatological divine act, the reversal of the damage caused by sin, and the perfection of nature to share glory with redeemed humanity. A comparison of nature in Jewish apocalypses and Romans 8:19-22 reveals important insights into the theology of early Judaism and its influence on early Christian thought.

Description: Harry S. Guntrip was best known for his affiliation with two famous psychoanalysts from what is known as the British Independent tradition of psychoanalysis in England: Ronald Fairbairn and Donald Winnicott. This book traces the various influences on the development of his clinical and theological thinking in context of the historical tension between religion and psychoanalysis. The central feature of his development will be demonstrated as a series of polarities, both theoretical and personal, conflicts with which he wrestled theologically, psychologically, and interpersonally on the professional level and in his own personal psychoanalyses. A critical evaluation of the outcome of Guntrip's own personal psychoanalyses with Fairbairn and Winnicott will demonstrate the autobiographical nature of his theoretical analysis of schizoid phenomena: a psychological state of self-preoccupation and way of being in the world. --from the Introduction Endorsements: ""Theological existence, wrote Karl Barth, is the personal existence of the 'little theologian' which, he went on to say, is to participate totally in the problematic aspects of the self in community with others. In this exquisite excursion into the formative religious and psychological influences on the life and practice of Harry Guntrip, Trevor Dobbs probes the self's regressive dependence upon the other as an implicit theological existence for which God is the only reality sufficient to sustain the self in its paradoxical quest for relation and autonomy. In reading this, I was reminded that all theology is autobiographical (and therefore psychological) if it is to be an authentic conversation that includes God, self and others. This is a book that will stimulate and extend that conversation."" --Ray S. Anderson Fuller Theological Seminary ""In the century-long dialogue between psychoanalysis and religion, analysts have been accustomed to reflecting on the role of psychoanalytic elements in religious thinking and practice. The opposite consideration--the degree to which religious orientations and concepts might have played a role in the development of psychoanalytic thinking and theorizing--has been largely ignored. Dobbs' careful study brings this latter perspective into dramatic focus. The pivotal figure is Harry Guntrip--himself a complex figure who was both Congregational minister and psychoanalyst. Guntrip himself was profoundly influenced by his religious upbringing and beliefs. Dobbs shows how these influences found their way into his psychoanalytic theorizing. But more interesting and perhaps more important was his involvement with two of the giants of psychoanalysis--Ronald Fairbairn and Donald Winnicott. Dobbs' detailed analysis reveals how the interactions among the members of this psychoanalytic troika were powerfully shaped and guided by their respective religious backgrounds and religious commitments. We learn about Guntrip's Wesleyan Congregationalism, Fairbairn's Calvinistic Presbyterianism, and Winnicott's revivalist Methodism, and their reverberations in their respective approaches to psychoanalysis as well as their impact on Guntrip himself who was analyzed by both men. The implications of these findings reach well beyond their immediate contexts and speak to the broader issues of how religion and religious persuasions can come to play a role in how we as analysts think about analysis. This realization opens a broad new territory for meaningful exploration and analytic understanding for those interested in the dialogue between psychoanalysis and religion, a dialogue that really is, it turns out, a two-way conversation. Professor Dobbs' detailed reconstruction is an important and valuable contribution--one that enriches our understanding of psychoanalysis itself and that interested readers would be well-advised to ponder."" --W. W. Meissner, SJ, MD Boston College About the Contributor(s): Trevor M. Dobbs, PhD, is Core Faculty in t

Experts in both the mental and medical health professions have endeavored to formulate comprehensible explanation for the remarkable recoveries made by people under their care. As we struggle with the seemingly endless battle with mental disorders, and increasingly resistant strains of viruses, many professionals are looking to alternative methodologies. It is no secret that the battle is complex and staged with many players, most of whom have questionable motives. Attitudes and opinions run deep and the level of pride from one school of thought to another can be outright childish. Regulation of how treatment should be provided is another area that seriously lacks direction. Politicians are transitory in their positions, and most of them direct both resources and influence toward the largest pool of voters, and/or the most significant interest group. This is not an indictment against their integrity, but a candid observation of their predicament. Alternative medicine and psychological therapies have expanded until now they are becoming just as popular as traditional treatments. In the midst of all of these dynamics we find routine accounts of divine healing, and deliverance from mental afflictions. This book focuses on the comparisons between secular medicine, including mental health therapies, divine healing, and most importantly, Christian counseling. Considerable attention has been dedicated to historical development, clinical results, and the attributes of the different approaches currently being used. The primary objective of this work is to pry into the sensitive area of the valued principles and practices of secular psychology and traditional medicine, to improve the generalunderstanding of these areas within the Christian community. This book aims to expose the link between Christian faith and improved mental and physical health. It will reveal serious weaknesses among Christians' and Church Leaders concerning mental health counseling. It will also bring to light the lack of clarity and direction in America's mental health care system, and the dangers of hybrid Christian counseling models used by the Church. The last objective is to present Scriptural based solutions that can be used in a professional and practical way. (Dr. Drake Perry 2006)

Help Overcoming Painful Experiences (H.O.P.E.) is a non-profit organization that both cultivates and promotes the value of spiritual and emotional health from a Biblical perspective. Our mission is to provide a safe place to work through the emotional issues that hinder us from fully embracing God, others, and life with enthusiasm.

To accomplish our mission, H.O.P.E. was designed to help people 1) overcome emotional pain from a variety of issues, 2) build a safe and healthy support network, 3) comprehend the truths about God in the midst of pain while exposing and replacing lies and 4) experience a life transformation through the healing power of Jesus Christ. In essence, we resurrect hope.

Our support and recovery model consists of three levels. "Doorway to H.O.P.E." is used in Level 1 and focuses on Three Truths About Life. These truths are used as an encouragement for beginning the journey to emotional and spiritual wholeness and healing. They also expose needs, tear down barriers to making healthy changes and "wet appetites" for experiencing God's transformational power.

Drawing from principles and analogies in mathematics, chemistry, physics, and sports fitness training, Dr. Cosenza offers a bold and time-honored spiritual direction for shifting our values so as to maximize valor and resilience. This book is a carefully researched guide for personal and professional growth that systematically helps us to move away from a crisis to healthy and valiant living. On a 25-year quest for the meaning of "selfvalue," the author/psychologist unveils the biblical origin and characteristics of "spiritual valueness." Describing crises as imbalances of spiritual values, Dr. Cosenza explains types and subtypes of spiritual crises so that we can overcome life's pressuring circumstances. A step-wise spiritual fitness training model is presented that employs biblically based balance exercises to prevent, evaluate, and correct specific critical conditions. This unique form of spiritual fitness has major applications for individuals in need as well as spiritual leaders, mental health professionals, and health fitness trainers.

This book deals with the primary elements of substance abuse, addiction and treatment. The different theories regarding the etiologies of addiction are discussed with a view towards efficacious treatment and follow up. Included are both the secular-clinical and spiritual paradigms for dealing with what many feel is a "runaway epidemic" around the world.

Help Overcoming Painful Experiences (H.O.P.E.) is a non-profit organization that both cultivates and promotes the value of spiritual and emotional health from a Biblical perspective. Our mission is to provide a safe place to work through the emotional issues that hinder us from fully embracing God, others, and life with enthusiasm. To accomplish our mission, H.O.P.E. was designed to help people 1) overcome emotional pain from a variety of issues, 2) build a safe and healthy support network, 3) comprehend the truths about God in the midst of pain while exposing and replacing lies and 4) experience a life transformation through the healing power of Jesus Christ. In essence, we resurrect hope. Our support and recovery model consists of three levels. Names of H.O.P.E. is used during Level 2 and centers on names of God that connect with and meet the needs encountered while going through painful experiences in life. Each lesson relates one of God's names to the truth of His character and shows how He alone can provide what is needed on the journey to emotional and spiritual wholeness and healing.

How do modern Muslims adapt their traditions to engage with today's world? Charles Tripp's erudite and incisive book considers one of the most significant challenges faced by Muslims over the last sixty years: the challenge of capitalism. By reference to the works of noted Muslim scholars, the author shows how, faced by this challenge, these intellectuals devised a range of strategies which have enabled Muslims to remain true to their faith, whilst engaging effectively with a world not of their own making. The work is framed around the development of their ideas on Islamic socialism, economics and the rationale for Islamic banking. While some Muslims have resorted to confrontation or insularity to cope with the challenges of modernity, most have aspired to innovation and ingenuity in the search for compromise and interaction with global capitalism in the twenty-first century.

This book addresses the inadequacies that we all face, each time we find ourselves confronted with the challenge of comforting someone who has just faced a tragedy. It points out the emptiness in some of the things that we do or say at such times and urges us to take a more thoughtful and realistic approach when comforting hurting people.