Caring for God's People: Counseling and Christian Wholeness (Integrating Spirituality Into Pastoral Counseling)

Culbertson has built his text around the ideal of Christian wholeness and maturity-a healthy interconnectedness of self-within-community. The heart of the book lies in its presentation of the three schools of counseling theory that Culbertson finds most helpful: family systems theory narrative counseling theory and object relations theory. Each of these is explained in detail and then applied to the most common and challenging of counseling situations: pre-marital counseling marriage counseling divorce counseling counseling gay men and women and grief counseling. Culbertson brings new sensitivities to the counseling scene-a more nuanced grasp of gender a new sense of families issues of sexual orientation a strong sense of the relationship of emotions to spirituality an empathetic attitude a pragmatic but professional mix of ancillary theories and a sense of the relevance of the counselors own self-understanding.