“Anton T. Boisen: A Vision for All Ages”
Glenn H. Asquith, Jr., PhD.
CPSP Plenary, Chicago, Illinois
CPSP March 15, 2015
I want to express my sincere thanks to all of you in CPSP for inviting me to give this address and to receive the 14th annual Helen Flanders Dunbar award. I am honored to be in the company of the other esteemed recipients of this award, including Robert Powell, Allison Stokes, Bob Dykstra, Myron Madden, and Harold Ellens. Edward Thornton (2008) taught me at Crozer Theological Seminary and then, when Wayne Oates retired, Edward arrived at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary just in time to supervise my doctoral dissertation on Boisen. Rodney Hunter (2009) is my “blood brother” from our work on the original Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling during 1987-88 (Hunter, 1990). Orlo Strunk (2011) was editor of the Journal of Pastoral Care and Counseling while I was on the editorial committee and, more importantly, was the impetus and the producer of my book on Anton Boisen that was originally published by Journal of Pastoral Care Publications in 1992 that all of you have been given at this meeting (Asquith, 1992). Orlo really pushed to make this a quality publication, including the wonderful drawing of trailing arbutus on the front cover and the historic picture of Boisen on the front page.
I am aware that this is a dinner meeting and that all of you are settled in after a big meal, which means that I probably need to be funny in order to keep you awake. Is there anything funny about Anton T. Boisen? I believe so. When I was in graduate school, my mentor Wayne Oates introduced us to Boisen’s foundational work in pastoral theology and Clinical Pastoral Education. We began speaking the language of Boisen. Whenever we encountered someone who was obviously mentally ill, some brilliant diagnostician in our midst would inevitably say, “Wow, THERE is a real Living Human Document!”
But aren’t we ALL Living Human Documents? This was part of Boisen’s theological and psychological genius. We are all children of God, we are all sacred texts, and therefore we are allworthy of study and care by religiously and theologically trained professionals as well as by physicians.
As was mentioned in the publicity, I have been researching and writing about Boisen for about 40 years. I was indeed introduced to him by my main mentor, Wayne E. Oates, during my Ph.D. study at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Oates knew Boisen personally, he had visited him at Elgin State Hospital, and he respected Boisen’s message and approach. Oates’ message was Boisen’s message: that the “long memory” of Biblical and theological understanding must never be left out of our care of individuals. This made a lot of sense to me. I began my journey in Clinical Pastoral Education in 1970, and I remember being bothered by an emphasis on psychology at the expense of theology. We would give theology an obligatory nod as we discussed cases, but then we would quickly turn to psychology to answer the question of “what’s really going on.”
When I started reading Boisen, a very brilliant light went on when I got to the part about “living human documents.” His insights about how the study of theology is completed by a study of real human experience tapped right into my own experience in theological education. My Introduction to Theology course at Crozer Theological Seminary took a very classical, systematic approach to teaching theology. Through the course of the semester we were assigned to write 5 pages on the Doctrine of God, followed by 5 pages on Christology, followed by 5 pages on the Holy Spirit, etc. How does a 22-year-old person write 5 pages on the Doctrine of God ex nihilo? For this 22-year-old, that was basically impossible! The well was dry! In spite of reading classical theology, which at that point made little sense to me, I realized that I still had nothing real—from the heart—to say about the doctrine of God. It was agonizing! I’d sit up all night, and by dawn I’d manage to squeeze out 3 pages, and get a “C!”
I muddled through my entire M.Div. degree with a severe case of theology phobia. I could never quite get it. Then I got to graduate school with a mentor who strongly believed in living human documents. He never wanted us to be without a clinical assignment. We called Oates the “Godfather” because he gave us offers for clinical assignments that we couldn’t refuse. My first one was as chaplain at Woodsbend State Boys’ Camp in eastern Kentucky. Three weeks after I got there, a 17 year-old boy died almost instantly after slamming his head on a paved parking lot during a scuffle with other residents of the camp. For the next 8 months I sat with grieving parents and family, shell-shocked adolescents who didn’t know that 17 year-old people could die, and grieving and anxious staff who had to rebuild the reputation of this premier treatment facility for troubled boys. This 22 year-old man who was now 26 suddenly learned more about death and its meaning than I ever really wanted to learn, from the multiple living human documents who had to cope with it. I even wrote a Master’s thesis on it, and grief as my first clinical specialty was born.
But then, I went from being a “delinquent” chaplain to an “elderly” chaplain at Woodhaven Medical Services south of Louisville. The living human documents there were scary, especially the restrained, demented, and very sick men who looked like me 50 years later. As Henri Nouwen said, I had to befriend the “aging stranger within me” so that I could relax and listen to their stories (Nouwen, 1976). Then, I began spending a lot of time with Bert. When I first came to Woodhaven, I thought Bert was a staff member; I was surprised to learn later that he was actually a resident who volunteered to deliver the mail daily to the other residents. As he made his rounds, he was a cheering, upbeat presence for all that he met. I got to know and appreciate him as he assisted me with chapel services, and he always had a joke to tell. But after about 2 years, Bert became very disabled and too sick to deliver the mail. I went to visit him and learned that he had cancer of the bone marrow, a devastating disease that left this once-able and cheerful man languishing in severe pain. During our visit, he looked at me with an anguished face and asked, “Preacher, why do I have to suffer like this?”
Bert’s question rattled me to the core. What did I believe? Why DO people have to suffer? I was taken back to square one of my faith. I retreated to the sanctuary of my office and began pouring over my Bible for something that could make sense out of that question. In the midst of my desperate quest, I was led to Romans 8:38-39: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” I ran back to Bert’s room, read him this passage, and expressed my own faith as a possible source of hope for him. I’m not sure exactly how much it helped him, but I do know one thing: Listening carefully to his narrative and having to deal with it in my heart and soul cured me of theology phobia! My particular pathway to full theological understanding was through a reading of the living human documents of real human experience. The books helped; the books gave me an important framework for thought and theological reflection. But, just as Boisen had taught me, my theology was incomplete until I completed it with living human experience. NOW I could think theologically about my ministry encounters. NOW I could see human suffering and crisis through the lens of faith and spiritual understanding as well as through the lens of behavioral science. NOW, I was a pastoral counselor and not “just” a counselor.
After Boisen had redeemed my ministry and cured my phobias, I had to know more. I had to know what his method was. I had to know what he did with living human documents, and I had to know what theology did those human documents complete in him? Thus began the odyssey of my in-depth journey into the life and work of Anton T. Boisen almost exactly 40 years ago, when I made my first trip to the Boisen archives right here in Chicago at Chicago Theological Seminary.
So what did I learn in 40 years? There are 3 areas that I want to share with you that I think are good examples of this AGELESS VISION of Anton T. Boisen—ways in which his thought and work remains—and will remain—vital and relevant to our ongoing work as pastors, pastoral psychotherapists, and chaplains. As I read through the covenant of CPSP, I understand all the more fully why Anton Boisen is so important to your organization. The principles and aspects of his vision are very consistent with your covenant “to address one another and to be addressed by one another in a profound theological sense.” Boisen always demanded that we remain aware of the theological dimension, and that we always use the “Queen of the Sciences” in our pastoral work. That is why he became my hero and I became his advocate.
The sacredness of individual texts and narratives
The first aspect of Boisen’s ageless vision is the sacredness of individual texts and narratives. Charles Gerkin really helped to define the depth of this principle in his 1984 book, The Living HumanDocument, in which he applied the methods of Biblical hermeneutics to pastoral care and counseling (Gerkin, 1984). The hermeneutical method of reading a Biblical text begins with the assumption that the text is sacred—it contains a truth that is important to human experience. We have to read that text with respect—respect for who the author(s) were, who the audience was, and what was the cultural, historical, and linguistic context in which the text was written. As Robert Powell (1975) pointed out, this was exactly the primary premise behind Boisen’s patient, respectful reading of the living human document—the narrative—the text—of psychiatric patients. He did not begin with global assumptions, he began with a listening ear, as he made a collegial and cooperative inquiry into the story of that particular person. In contemporary practice, Pamela Cooper-White (2004) calls this “intersubjectivity”—a context in which I do not approach you as a superior, wise person who knows the answer to all of your problems, but as a fellow human being who, while listening with a trained ear to your story, might reflect it back to you in a way that helps you make sense out of that story and, by the way, might help ME make some more sense out of my own story. That even becomes part of my reflection to you, obviously within therapeutic limits and boundaries.
This is what Boisen did. Psychologist Paul Pruyser observed that nearly all of Boisen’s work was “intensely autobiographical” (Pruyser, 1967). Yes, indeed it was. In talking to other patients, Boisen was indeed on a quest to make sense out of his own experience, to validate the meaning of the suffering that he went through in the midst of psychosis, self-flagellation and enormous internal conflict. Because of that autobiographical dimension, Boisen was discounted for years by theologians and professionals, including his former colleague Dr. Richard Cabot, who basically viewed Boisen as a crazy man running to other crazy people and looking for validation.
As you might guess, I completely disagree with that assessment. There is a difference between being autobiographical and being narcissistic. Who among us is not in the work we’re in because of a passion that developed out of our own life experience? At a workshop at a professional meeting, I became very interested in a study showing that 80% of social workers in one particular state came from dysfunctional families. We all have some autobiographical element to what we do, or we wouldn’t keep doing it for very long. Yes, Boisen’s work was autobiographical, but it was not narcissistic. He was not making it all about him. He wanted to bring people hope and courage. He was sensitive to how mentally ill people responded to certain Biblical passages and certain phrases in hymns and prayers, so he published four editions of a hymnal that would be appropriate for care of psychiatric patients (Boisen (Ed.), 1950). If Boisen were narcissistic, would he and his students spend hours typing up 8-10 single spaced pages of details of a person’s life from an interdisciplinary perspective? He did this to help them tell their narrative so that both he and the patient could find meaning in it.
This revolutionary method and vision, developed in the context of 1920’s medicine and psychiatric care, laid the groundwork for what we now know as contemporary narrative theology and narrative psychology. The tenets of these fields closely reflect Boisen’s method and vision. Narrative therapists propose that people make sense of their lives through a narrative form—through telling the story of their living human experience. Dr. Christie Neuger notes that
“Narrative therapists believe that the counselees who consult them are the experts on their own lives and values. The counselor does not represent expert knowledge about health or normalcy. Rather, the counselor brings a certain level of expertise in how to generate and structure therapeutic conversation in such a way that deconstruction of problem stories and re-authoring of alternative stories can occur.” (Neuger, 2010).
It is interesting that contemporary Narrative Therapy can be regarded as growing out of the postmodern movement, although its co-founders, Michael White and David Epston, prefer to call it post-structuralist. Neuger makes the following, very helpful observation about these movements in relationship to psychotherapy:
Postmodernism, especially as it is relevant to psychotherapy, questions the existence of grand narratives or universal explanations and, instead, values the particular, the local, and the importance of difference. Post- structuralism does not assume that there are deep structures or fixed truths that explain “human nature,” “personality,” or human difficulties. Therefore, therapists that operate out of a poststructuralist perspective tend to reject pathologizing or diagnostic approaches to people’s problems and, instead, rely on counselees’ explanations for and meanings of the problems they bring to counseling. (Neuger, 2010)
This indeed sounds like Anton T. Boisen in the 21st century. Nearly 90 years ago, Boisen was proposing a postmodern perspective on psychotherapy before we even heard the term “postmodern!” The reason he proposed this, of course, was because he knew he was a square peg in the round hole of psychiatric care of the 1920’s. Nobody was listening to him or to HIS particular living human experience. In the 1920’s, being too religious was regarded as a symptom of mental illness, so anyone who came into the hospital with a Bible or other holy book had it taken from them, and any discussion of religious issues or concerns was completely discouraged. In very non-holistic, non-contextual fashion, it did not matter in this setting that a person like Boisen, who had a theological degree and was an ordained clergy person, would naturally think, feel, and reason in religious terms and language. That aspect of Boisen’s selfhood that was normal was regarded as abnormal in the psychiatric care of that era. He was a “man out of order,” a “mentally ill person” who was being viewed from “the top down” by a psychiatric establishment that needed to view him according to their categories (Sujai, 2010). Boisen was demanding that, instead of being “pathologized,” people would listen to HIS meaning from HIS context. That was why he so diligently and quite compulsively wrote very detailed case studies of Oscar O., Harrison Wells, and dozens of others that filled his filing cabinets and got copiously distributed to his students. Listen to their stories, and as we listen to their stories, we help them arrive at their meaning. While this sounds like narrative therapy, it is also a profoundly PASTORAL approach to pastoral psychotherapy, because it honors the Imago Dei, the person whom God created.
When I began teaching at Moravian Theological Seminary, I became steeped in the German pietistic tradition that was behind much of Moravian belief and practice. I soon discovered that the early Moravians were very interested in the power of memoir— life story—especially when conducting funerals. When someone died, their written spiritual journey was completed by a family member or the pastor and read as the main message at the funeral service. The Moravians believed that hearing the full journey of a person’s life with God would be instructive to the rest of the community and help them in their spiritual journey. It was an effective way of both honoring and remembering the deceased while also building up the community with the narrative of their departed brother or sister’s living human document.
This narrative, or memoir, was called a lebenslauf, a German word literally meaning “life path.” The intended meaning of the word lebenslauf is that the path is like a stream of water flowing down a mountain. That stream never gets to flow in a straight, uninterrupted line. It has to go around barriers that it encounters—rock formations, trees, or berms. It might also occasionally go into a free fall off of a cliff, only to land at the next level and keep flowing. It’s the path of life and how we cope with whatever we encounter—but the key to it is the question of how did we or did we not encounter the presence of God in the midst of all of these twists and turns. For the Moravians, that testimony, that living human document, made someone’s spiritual life instructive for others. (Asquith, 1995)
Early in my time at Moravian, I picked up on this concept of lebenslauf and used it as a method in the teaching of pastoral theology. Boisen, of course, had a lot to do with that; I was always fascinated by living human documents, and here was a religious tradition that revered them! I developed my own form for the telling of a lebenslauf, based on an approach to religious history developed by Wayne Oates. I asked students to give an account of the meaning of their birth, injunctions received from family or significant others, losses and significant events, religious experiences, medical and cultural history, and key relationships, along with their understanding of how God was present in these various aspects.
I used this approach in two basic required courses. The first was in the introductory course “Learning as Ministry,” a first-semester requirement for all incoming students. As they began their journey of seminary education, I wanted them to become more conscious—more aware—of what brought them to seminary. How did God work in their lives up to this point? My assumption, again based on Boisen, was that the starting point in understanding theology was in being able to name our own theology—that is, how do we understand God in our particular experience? Our view of God is always seen through the filter of our own experience, so what are the nature and dimensions of that filter? Students found that realization quite enlightening, especially as their peers responded and reflected on their story.
The second place where I used lebenslauf was in the Pastoral Care and Counseling course, where the student’s own story was viewed alongside the student’s case presentations. I wanted to assist them not only with their theological reflection on the case, but also with their awareness of the parallel process that might exist between their story and the story of the parishioner or counselee. With feedback from their peers and supervisor, this exercise gave students a greater awareness of the pastoral theological perspective from which they do their work and, more importantly, insight into ways that they might be projecting their story onto the client’s story (Asquith, 2000).
Modern medical care could learn much from Boisen’s approach to persons as a sacred text. In the last six years I have accompanied my wife to multiple physicians as her illnesses became more complex and more debilitating. We became more and more frustrated as we encountered physicians who would not listen to Connie as the patient. We learned that many physicians, when encountered with something they don’t understand or that they don’t want to deal with, have a very standard answer: “It’s all in your head—go see a psychiatrist.” Some of them outright lied on their reports of tests. We finally figured out a primary source of our frustration: The major hospital in our area had dealt with a lawsuit from someone claiming to have Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome (Connie’s illness—also known as Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy), and their response to that lawsuit was to declare—as a teaching hospital, mind you—that that diagnosis DOES NOT EXIST. After enough people, sometimes abusively, tell you that you’re crazy, you start to believe it! But this is obviously a complete dismissal of the sacred text—it’s like saying that YOU don’t exist. It is the exact opposite of understanding your patient as Imago Dei. And, it is the exact opposite of being a healer; Boisen would have a lot to say about that. We did finally find some real healers in Philadelphia who acknowledged that Connie and her illness DO exist and that she was NOT crazy. Thanks be to God! It’s because of those healers that she is able to be here tonight.
Theological reflection in individual and corporate experience
The second, eternally enduring aspect of Boisen’s vision is his call for theological reflection in both individual AND corporate experience. This was a distinct part of Boisen’s genius that many in our field initially overlooked. Yes, Boisen focused on individual experience as we just discussed. But he ALSO devoted nearly as much energy to theological reflection on the religious experience of social groups. He declared this in 1936 in The Exploration of the Inner World. He said, “I have sought not to begin with the ready-made formulations contained in books but with the living human documents and with actual social conditions in all their complexity.” (Boisen, 1971, 185) Just as he wanted to know how religion functioned in the healing of individuals, so also he applied his same method to the study of how religion functioned for social groups. He studied the history and function of religion in the county in which he grew up in Bloomington, Indiana. For Arthur Holt he studied religion in the Roxbury section of Boston. He studied the religion of Pentecostal groups, known then as “holy rollers.” He published these and other group studies in his 1945 book Religion in Crisis and Custom. In 1946 he published Problems in Religion and Life, which he described as “a manual for pastors with outlines for the co-operative study of personal experience in social situations.” (Boisen, 1946, 3)
My point is, just as pastoral and medical care could be redeemed by the view of patients, parishioners, and clients as Imago Dei, we still live in an age that is desperately in need of serious theological reflection on our social conditions. In 2010, pastoral theologian Ryan LaMothe eloquently stated that there is a serious “hermeneutical crisis” in all aspects of society—business, government, religious leadership—and we are still desperately in need of religious leaders and organizations that can serve as interpretive guides, and thus as agents of hope, in these hermeneutical crises (LaMothe, 2010). Every day as we listen to world news, we are reminded again that we still don’t know how to solve ethnic, racial, and gender violence; we see business and personal irresponsibility; we see corrupt and deceitful governments and dictatorships; there is addiction to personal and political power that destroys governments, academic institutions, and churches; there is marginalization of the poor; and any other of numerous sins of humanity against humanity. Even the corporate models of institutional churches and denominations could also be redeemed by serious reflection on each person in the church system as Imago Dei. We are religious leaders, and many of us educate religious leaders. We continue to address the whole person and the whole society in every way that we can. To that end, I believe we can still learn from Boisen’s call for theological reflection in both individual and corporate experience, so that we can stop abusing and killing one another and start revering each other as Imago Dei. I am VERY happy that CPSP is committed to that goal, because God knows that we could all use a little more theological reflection!
Method is Content
Finally, I just want to lift up an ongoing theological challenge that is left for us by the work of Anton T. Boisen—the idea that our theological method IN ITSELF provides us with theological content. As I mentioned earlier in this address, I became impassioned in 1974, in the course of my doctoral study, with the desire to know more about the results of Boisen’s theological inquiry. How did he take these case studies, the living human documents of individual and social experience, and translate them into a theology that informed his pastoral work? At that point I agreed with the assertion of Seward Hiltner that pastoral theology was the theological reflections of the pastor while engaged in the practice of ministry. But I also wanted to say that pastoral theology was the theology and understanding of God that informs the method and practice of ministry. So what was that theology for Boisen? Surely he had to have some set of systematic beliefs that guided him in his work, which came from his study of experience. This was the final “holy grail” that would cure the last piece of my theology phobia. If I could show and prove that a systematic theology came out of experience, I would be validating the assertion of John Wesley and other reformers that experience is indeed the fourth source of theological content. That assertion is rejected, of course, by many classical theologians who believe that sola scriptura is the only valid source of belief. It is why pastoral and practical theology is still a second-class citizen in the curricula of some theological schools.
So, with the help of a systematic theologian at my school who became my first dissertation advisor, I proposed to the faculty that I wanted to study “the clinical method of theological inquiry of Anton T. Boisen.” (Asquith, 1976) One of my objectives of that study was to show the theology that resulted from that inquiry. I came up here to Chicago and hung out at the archives of the Alice Batchelder room for three weeks. I grabbed and copied everything theological that I could lay my hands on—lecture notes, letters, unpublished and published papers—and, of course, multiple case studies. I looked through all of Boisen’s published writings, and I found especially helpful the short theological definitions that he included in The Exploration of the Inner World. But wait! After all of this work, I saw no systematic theology! In some cases, the theology that both informed and resulted from his work sounded quite evangelical, such as his beliefs about sin and salvation. But then his view of God as the “fellowship of the best” sounded like a product of the liberal theology of his alma mater, Union Theological Seminary. No systematics here! So what is it? I finally threw my hands up and called it “dynamic experientialism.” For Boisen, that was a theology. It was the theological understanding that grew out of a study of persons and groups and, as such, it was changeable based on the living human documents that informed it. It was indeed an empirical theology, but you could also liken its method to that of Liberation/Feminist/Womanist Theology, which is based on the lived experience of particular groups; you could compare it to process theology, which holds that God and the nature of God evolve in interaction with humanity and society; and you can certainly find its method in narrative theology as mentioned earlier.
So, is Boisen’s theology and, by inheritance, pastoral theology, method or content? For me, the answer is YES. One part of Boisen’s legacy is that method IS content. Method gives us an understanding of how faith works for real people and real social groups. And therefore, we can take that theology and apply it to our practice. It gives us an answer to the Berts of the world that are desperate to know if God still loves them in the midst of personal tragedy. It gives us an ability to respect the Biblical and theological beliefs that sustain people through the twists and turns of their life, regardless of whether we agree with those beliefs. It gives us a framework to care for each person we meet as imago dei. In my view, that idea, that method, and that content is both timeless and priceless—it is the key to effective ministry, and it is the gift of a man who battled many demons in this life and yet triumphed with a vision for all ages.
Conclusion
Anton T. Boisen was the victim of the very inadequate medical and psychiatric care of his day. He was also the victim of large church structures, into which he never seemed to fit. It is no wonder, then, that he approached psychiatric patients with a sincere desire to carefully read their living human document and assist them to be all that they could be—and to provide them with the respect and care that he himself desperately needed but had not received.
I found it to be very theologically revealing to learn that the Chinese write the concept of “crisis” with two characters, one of which represents “danger” and the other of which means “opportunity.” Boisen’s personal crisis with severe mental illness could have defeated him and resulted in his being warehoused and locked away for the rest of his life—that was the “danger” in it. But, with the help of a caring community, Boisen was able to turn that severe personal crisis into an opportunity—an opportunity to provide real, spiritually-based help to people in crisis, and an opportunity to guide highly skilled theological students in reading the living human documents of life experience, so that pastors, chaplains, and pastoral counselors are not just rote clinicians but the “wounded healers” that Henri Nouwen spoke of in his classic book by that title (Nouwen, 1972). A wounded healer is a listener, someone who is willing to listen fully to the details of someone’s pain, examine the nature of individual “soul injury,” (Grassman, 2012) and become a companion in the difficult journey to wholeness. In my own life, and with the “soul injuries” that I have had to face over the years, Boisen became my hero, and I became his advocate. I am very grateful to all of you in CPSP that you have given me this chance to speak for him, and to celebrate the timeless legacy that he has left for all of us who labor in clinical and pastoral work.
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REFERENCES
Asquith, G.H. (1976). The clinical method of theological inquiry of Anton T. Boisen (Doctoral dissertation, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, KY)
Asquith, G.H. (1995). The lebenslauf as a source of theological understanding. Transatlantic Moravian Dialogue-Correspondence (TMDK) 7, 53-62.
Asquith, G.H. (2000). Symposium: Teaching pastoral theology as part of the M.Div. curriculum. The Journal of Pastoral Theology 10:1, 28-32.
Asquith, G. H. (Ed.). (1992). Vision from a little known country: A Boisen reader. Decatur, GA: Journal of Pastoral Care Publications, Inc.
Boisen, A.T. (1971). The exploration of the inner world. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Boisen, A.T. (Ed.). (1950) Hymns of Hope and Courage. 4th rev. & enl. ed. Chicago, IL: Chicago Theological Seminary.
Boisen, A.T. (1946). Problems in religion and life. Nashville, TN: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press.
Boisen, A.T. (1955). Religion in crisis and custom. New York, NY: Harper and Brothers.
Cooper-White, P. (2004). Shared wisdom. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.
Gerkin, C. V. (1984). The living human document: Re-visioning pastoral counseling in a hermeneutical mode. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press.
Grassman, D.L. (2012). The hero within: Redeeming the destiny we were born to fulfill. St Petersburg, FL: Vandamere Press.
Hunter, R.J. (Ed.) (1990). Dictionary of pastoral care and counseling. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press.
LaMothe, R. (2010) Reflections on pastoral leadership in the face of cultural-communal “ruin.” The Journal of Pastoral Theology 20:1, 1-21.
Neuger, C.C. (2010). Narrative therapy. In Asquith, G. H. (Ed.), The concise dictionary of pastoral care and counseling (pp. 17-20). Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press.
Nouwen, H.J.M. & Gaffney, W.J. (1976). Aging: The fulfillment of life. New York, NY: Bantam Doubleday Dell.
Nouwen, H.J.M. (1972) The wounded healer: Ministry in contemporary society. New York, NY: Doubleday.
Powell, R.C. (1975). CPE: Fifty years of learning through supervised encounter with living human documents. New York, NY: Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, Inc.
Pruyser, P.W. (1967). Anton T. Boisen and the psychology of religion. The Journal of Pastoral Care21:4, 209-219.
Sujai, A. (2010). A Sufi teaching on reshaping the conditioned mind through mindfulness awareness: A key resource for paying attention to racial differences in pastoral care. Plenary presentation to the annual study conference of the Society for Pastoral Theology, June 17-19.
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Glenn H. Asquith, Jr., PhD.
glennasquith@msn.com