Originating at the 2011 conference of the International Academy of Practical Theology in Amsterdam, this volume explores the practical theological significance of desire. Although desire is central to many issues in practical theology and related disciplines, it is only rarely discussed under its own name. Three introductory chapters locate desire in concrete practices in the city and discuss the phenomenology, theology, and ethics of desire. Subsequent sections are organized around embodying desire, culturing desire, and transforming desire. The chapters include various kinds of desire, such as sexuality, consumerism, and spirituality. Perspectives from different contexts and religious traditions are offered in this rich and thought-provoking book. (Series: International Practical Theology - Vol. 16)

In the last decade, the focus of pastoral theology has shifted dramatically from care defined as counseling to care understood within a wider social, political, and religious context. Feminist and womanist theory as well as feminist and womanist faith convictions have played a key role in this development.

According to the authors, feminists and womanists in pastoral theology have begun to reconstruct the definitions, parameters, and commitments of pastoral care and counseling. These changes have critical implications for care within congregations and for the understanding of theology in seminaries and dignity schools.

Yet these developments in the theory and practice of pastoral theology and their broader ramifications have not been carefully analyzed or even acknowledged by pastoral theologian, minister, and religion scholar alike. This is due to a failure to articulate clear understandings of the field, the gap between congregational ministry and higher education in religion, and conflicts in theological education in general over the place of practice and theory, experience, spirituality, and practical theology.

To redress these problems, this collection of essays has a threefold aim. First, the book identifies the many changes occurring in definitions of pastoral theology, care, and counseling. Second, the volume defines and develops new methods and approaches. Third, the authors attend to the implications of these changes for congregational care and theological education. Roughly speaking, the order of the chapters in this volume follows this threefold agenda, moving from an exploration of the changes in pastoral theology to its reconstruction to some of the implications ofrecent innovations.

What is the status of the American family? How is it changing? Are these changes making anything better? What is the future of the family? Does religion offer a positive answer? Not since "Habits of the Heart" has one book confronted these important issues with such personal and societal impact. This groundbreaking study argues for the creation of a new family ethic that must be central to the agendas of both contemporary society and the church.

The Family, Culture, and Religion series offers informed and responsible analyses of the state of the American family from a religious perspective and provides practical assistance for the family's revitalization.

As the twentieth century closes, the cry for equality between the sexes is provoking unprecedented conflicts between women and men in the workplace and in the family. Women of all colors and classes continue to carry out an enormous amount of indispensable, unremunerated caring labor, which at once undergirds and is peripheral to human life--as men have defined it--and therefore without value. Also a Mother protests this definition of work and value, and claims that beneath the everyday scuffles over gender roles and child care lies an essential religious crisis of work and love.

Drawing on her situation as seminary professor and mother of three sons, Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore argues that Christian ideals of motherly self-sacrifice and fatherly hard work, as they have been interpreted by church tradition and promoted in society at large, not only fail the lives of many people today, but misrepresent both the intent of God's creation and the promise of the gospel message itself. She asks: How might theological doctrines of love, self-sacrifice creation, procreation, vocation, and community better respond to women and men who want to work in fulfilling ways and to love in intimate relationships including those that involve raising children? To answer adequately, theology must seriously entertain what mothers think, feel, desire, and know bodily, in a way that it has failed to do thus far.

The Christian feminist maternal theology that Miller-McLemore proposes challenges the mores of a society that has selectively divided the burdens and rewards of family and work along gender lines, calls for a rereading of biblical and theological traditions that have been wrongly used to uphold this division, and reclaims the values of caring labor for both men and women.

For the past fifty years, scholars in both pastoral and practical theology have attempted to recapture human religious experience and practice as essential sites for theological engagement -- redefining in the process what theology is, how it is done, and who does it. In this book Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore shows how this trend in scholarship has led to an expanded subject matter, alternative ways of knowing, and richer terms for analysis in doing Christian theology.
Tracing more than two decades of her own search for a more inclusive discipline -- one that truly grapples with theology in the midst of life -- Christian Theology in Practice shows not only where Miller-McLemore herself has traveled in the field but also how pastoral and practical theology has developed during this time. Looking forward, Miller-McLemore calls on the academy and Christian congregations to disrupt conventional theological boundaries and to acknowledge the multiplicity of shapes and places in which the "wisdom of God" appears..