Caring for God's People: Counseling and Christian Wholeness

Philip Culbertson

Jan 2000 · Fortress Press

About this ebook

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 counselor's own self-understanding.

About the author

Philip Culbertson teaches Pastoral Care and Counseling at St Johns Theological College; Counseling Psychology at Auckland University; Psychotherapy at Auckland University of Technology; and has a private practice in psychotherapy.

He holds a Bachelors degree in Music from Washington University, a Masters degree in Divinity from General Theology Seminary in New York City, and a PhD in Education from New York University. He has done additional graduate studies at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, The Ecumenical Institute of the World Council of Churches in Bossey Switzerland, and at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand.

Culbertson belongs to the American Academy of Religion, the Society of Biblical Literature, and the New Zealand Association of Psychotherapists.

He is the author of New Adam: The Future of Masculine Spirituality (Fortress Press, 1991) and coeditor, with Arthur Shippee, of The Pastor: Readings from the Patristic Period (Fortress Press, 1990).