Читать книгу Converging Horizons - Allan Hugh Cole - Страница 8

This collection of discrete essays offers perspectives on how to provide support and care to persons, including individuals, families, and groups. Essays focus on a range of personal needs that interest ministers, chaplains, pastoral counselors, and social workers and attend to the work of understanding, leading, and assisting persons in their care.

For two decades of professional life I have worked with a view toward multiple academic and professional horizons, by which I mean perspectives or points of view. These horizons include pastoral theology, pastoral care and counseling, the psychology of religion, and social work. I have been attentive to how those whose life’s work seeks to lessen human need and to improve the lives of persons in their care—ministers, chaplains, pastoral counselors, and social workers in particular—may best engage in these efforts, individually and collectively. My attention grows out of a desire to promote human flourishing but also from my multifaceted professional identity and experiences. These include working as a minister, a seminary professor and administrator, and currently as a professor and administrator in a school of social work. Moreover, ever since I attended seminary and social work school successively in the 1990s, I have given considerable time and energy to thinking about the relationship between theory and practice in the helping professions and to evaluating different methods of interdisciplinary work that draw on multiple fields of inquiry and practice—multiple horizons. In my case, then and now, these fields have most often included theological disciplines, social work, and the social and human sciences, especially psychology and counseling theories.

The essays in this volume demonstrate approaches to integrative work that draw several fields of theory and practice into a convergence, a coming together for a common goal. This goal is to be helpful to those whose work aims to assist persons in need, especially when those needs relate to personal experiences or concerns that meet at the intersection of mental health and religious faith or spirituality.