Why Write the Books?
The three books mentioned in these blogs are:
Promise of the Soul, Identifying and Healing your Spiritual Agreements;
Book of Weeks, a Roadmap for Transformational Education; and,
Breaking the Spiritual Care Code, Toward a Standard of Practice.
I wrote an article for the Journal of Pastoral Care in 1980 titled “Covenants with God.” The article was intended as a part of a curriculum but also as a personal help handbook for those wanting to grow spiritually. It was helpful to my students and seemed to be helpful to those who read the article.
I have always been a “curriculum guy” interested in why and how we do what we do in the field of spiritual care.
Covenants with God started out as a chapter of a general book on Spiritual Care. Following advice of a friend who had been an editor I submitted the concept of covenants to publishers and with the help of an agent was signed by Wiley publishing to write what became Promise of the Soul.
I was trained in clinical pastoral education in the Boston area one of the birth places of clinical training for spiritual care providers. When I was there the Doctor of Ministry degree that used CPE was really a school for the training of clinical educators. ACPE has not had such an approach since that school closed many years ago now.
I often get asked by ACPE Educators what they should do when they are beginning to train educators themselves. It is much different then training chaplain students or general spiritual care providers.
That is why I wrote Book of Weeks which expanded on my education diary out of that Boston program. It is intended to help students look at the recurring themes of a CPE unit and let those be a guide for their theory development and a roadmap for their training units.
The Pandemic led me to pull out of my file the original manuscript on Spiritual Care and it led to Breaking the Spiritual Care Code. There have been a lot of books written about Spiritual Care. Often, they are written about spiritual care in a particular context. This can imply that there is no “standard of care” that can be used in what ever context spiritual care is provided, thus Breaking the Spiritual Care Code.
Each of these books can be purchased on this website at a discounted rate.