engaging in practices and ways of scholarship with a trust that a congruent whole, a restored person, a revitalized community, or new insights will be the result. Cole embodies such faith and those around him benefit from it. These essays also show how in one’s work, over time, common themes and conversation partners return, ever deepening and widening our practices, insights, and knowledge.
Most readers, I imagine, will identify with Cole’s transparent disclosure that he, like many pastoral theologians, is both unconventional and temperate (or traditional), or that being a pastoral theologian in the academy, the church, or society is not always easy. He echoes fellow pastoral theologian and dean, Michael Koppel, who writes that some leaders are “misfits”—“persons [with] qualities and experiences that do not correspond to dominant perspectives” (Koppel, 2008, 3). Misfit leaders, Koppel argues, are excellent leaders. We can add that misfit caregivers and pastoral theologians are exceptional caregivers and dynamic theologians! Drawing on theology, psychology, psychology of religion, psychodynamic and social theories, poetry and literature, as well as evidenced-based research, and by looking at religion, loss, mourning, melancholia, and mood disorders differently, Cole is a misfit—or as he puts it, prone to “misbehaving.” Of course, we are almost immune to messages of “misbehaving” as daily the media notifies us of yet another celebrity or role model that portrayed some form of antisocial or delinquent behavior. Cole has in mind another sort of “misbehaving.” One needs a pastoral theological imagination to see “misbehaving” as a trait worth cultivating in oneself and in future pastoral leaders and care providers.
Converging Horizons initiates those new to pastoral theology into a vibrant tradition with a long history and an identity that defies clear definition. It informs significant inquiry around loss and mourning, melancholia, identity, and male religion. The book instills confidence in being a caregiver that facilitates flourishing. It empowers narratives of restoration. Furthermore, the book challenges caregivers to recognize the intricate link between our relationships, our systems, our psychodynamic lives, and the ways we shape and engage our religions. It affirms the many misfit, misbehaving caregivers, unconventional yet temperate, working in churches, schools, social work agencies, hospitals, corporate buildings, and elsewhere. But mostly, Converging Horizons: Essays in Religion, Psychology, and Caregiving resituates pastoral theology as the discipline guarding the care of souls. Toward this task, Allan Cole is a recognized leader.
Jaco J. Hamman
Vanderbilt University
Preface
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.
Acknowledgments
I appreciate the opportunity to publish a third book with Cascade Books, and to work again with the outstanding and gracious editorial, production, and marketing staff at Wipf and Stock. I am especially appreciative of Rodney Clapp, my editor; Jesselyn Ewing, my copy editor; K. C. Hanson, editor in chief; Matthew Wimer, assistant managing editor; Laura Poncy, editorial administrator; Ian Creeger, typesetting; the design team; and James Stock, director of marketing.
Alison Riemersma, executive assistant to the academic dean at Austin Seminary, where I served for eleven years, provided invaluable editorial and administrative support for this project. I remain grateful to her for her consistent proficiency and for her efforts in support of my work through the years.
My wife, Tracey Cole, and our daughters, Meredith and Holly, fill me with joy, laughter, and gratitude each day. Their love and presence in my life brings forth unmatched delight, and hope. My parents, Allan and Jeri Cole, have graced me with love, support, and encouragement, and I am thankful.
I am also thankful for Jaco Hamman, my longtime colleague and friend, who wrote the foreword to this book. We met as doctoral students and have grown up together as scholars and teachers. As one who works so ably at the intersections of psychology, religion, and counseling theories, he has taught me much by demonstrating why and how integrative approaches to caregiving prove invaluable.
For over three decades, Donald Capps, my doctoral advisor at Princeton Seminary, has been a leader in fields related to religion, psychology, and pastoral care and counseling. He has taught effectively and written prolifically, and through his pioneering work and his winsome nature he has mentored dozens of others, including scholars and practitioners in a range of academic disciplines and professional fields. He models how one may work at a point of converging horizons—that is, with hybridity across disciplines and practices of caregiving, in his case both as a pastoral theologian and psychologist of religion. In doing so, he demonstrates how moving back and forth within these complementary areas of study in one’s scholarship may strengthen both of these professional identities and their tasks. More important, Don demonstrates untold generosity toward his students, which illustrates even more vividly than his fine scholarship what profound kindness, attention, and concern may offer to those who learn and hope to teach others. This book is dedicated to him with my admiration and deep gratitude.
1
Pastoral Theology
Protestant
Term
The meaning of pastoral theology is imprecise and no single definition is universally accepted, particularly among Protestant traditions. Currently, it is understood principally in three ways that are related but have different emphases: (1) A theology and practice of pastoral care and counseling; (2) An approach to theology concerned with relating Christian faith claims to the broader world, giving particular attention to methods of pastoral reflection and practice; and (3) An academic discipline within theological education that attends to the foci cited in the previous two definitions.
Classical Period
Taken from the Latin pastoralis, meaning “of the shepherd,” pastoral theology originally described the theology of Christian ministry broadly conceived
