This fascinating book guides family therapists in recognizing the importance of their clients'spirituality or religion to therapy. Experienced therapists demonstrate how to incorporate patients'spiritual beliefs in successful family therapy. Religion and the Family explains how the spirituality of individuals and families can be used as a valuable resource for understanding and healing family problems. Therapists will learn to utilize a couple's or family's particular god-construct as a fundamental part of the treatment system.Through a balanced combination of theory and clinical data, this comprehensive book gives family therapy practitioners and graduate-level students insight into the role of spirituality in therapy. Beginning with a brief historical overview of the relationship between religion and therapy, the book emphasizes the three areas of theory, clinical applications, and research. Family therapists will find important topics applicable to their practice, such as a model for the use of religion in therapy, a model for taking a spiritual genogram, observations about interfaith marriages, and a theory of therapy as spirituality. Graduate-level students, therapists in training, and therapists needing an introduction to religion in therapy will find this a valuable guide for incorporating spiritual and religious factors into treatment systems.

With compassion and commitment, practicing chaplains draw on a wide range of professional experiences and discuss principles, themes, and guidelines that have enhanced their ministries. These practical and successful approaches are aimed at helping others face the daily professional challenges of health care chaplaincy. The issues and responsibilities of chaplaincy work with a variety of patient populations--AIDS sufferers, long-term care patients, stroke victims, and the terminally ill--are thoroughly explored. Contributors provide creative and innovative methods of meeting the needs of hospital patients and their families as well as health care personnel, such as implementing a volunteer clergy program and establishing a surgical reporting plan.