Christotherapy Ii

Christotherapy II presents an holistic approach to healing and to facilitating psychological and spiritual maturation. The author's new model of psychological/spiritual synthesis brings together counseling and spiritual direction on a theoretical as well as practical level. His is one of the best available presentations of the precise relationship between the spiritual and the psychological spheres in practice and theory. Persons seeking spiritual and psychological growth and healing will find Christotherapy II a rewarding practical resource. Spiritual directors and counselors will especially appreciate the author's synthesis of spirituality and psychology. The author presents a detailed plan for integrating key psychological and spiritual methods. Individuals who are at various stages in struggles with ordinary emotional problems and with addictions will find concrete methods for self-therapy and for engaging in fruitful forms of prayer related to their particular struggles. Ministers and theologians interested in evangelization will find in this book a treatment for ongoing stages of religious and moral conversion.

Building on the groundbreaking original work with the same title, these articles focus on current issues, such as certain life stages, special populations, the devalued and abused, the addicted and special issues of the 1990's.

In an era when endless varieties of psychic salvation are produced and marketed...the sanity and depth of Tyrrell's book are very appealing. --Justin J. Kelly, S.J., in Theological Studies Parents, teachers, spiritual directors, therapists and counselors will welcome its healthy, intellectual and practical approach to therapy rooted in Christian revelation and tradition. --Homiletic and Pastoral Review ...[P]rovides excellent treatments of the self-image, of prayer and of Christ's meaning and value in human lives. --America ...[G]enuinely recommended as a significant attempt at integrating...counseling, psychotherapy, religion and mysticism in a framework that implies consistency and balance. --Charles A. Curran in Pastoral Psychology ...[L]ikely to remain for some time to come one of the most penetrating studies in the field of 'inner healing'. --The Way

A spiritual and psychological method of decision-making and discernment about life-styles based upon the centuries-old Christian Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola; updated and made more relevant for married couples and companions.

Offers a holistic approach to spiritual direction and pastoral counseling.

The process of human transformation is complex and ongoing. This book presents a framework for understanding human transformation through the insights of Bernard Lonergan. The reader will be introduced to terms such as the turn to the subject, consciousness, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. It will explore terms such as horizon, feelings, values, self-esteem, sublation, conversion, dialectic, and religious experience. The book explores transformation through the way mentors have authored their own lives, told their own stories, and taken possession of their interiority. Transformation is illustrated through the lives of saints and ordinary men and women who did extraordinary things, such as St. Augustine, Dag Hammarskjold, Vaclav Havel, Franz Jaggerstatter, St. Therese of Lisieux, Fredrich Nietzsche, Katherine Ann Power, and Marie Cardinal. Transformation is also illustrated through the medium of cinema: Babette's Feast, The Mission, As It is in Heaven, Romero, Dead Poets Society, Ordinary People, The Godfather trilogy, Three Color trilogy, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Dial M for Murder, and Twelve Angry Men. While the book treats religious, moral, affective, intellectual, and psychic conversion as moments of transformation, it argues that ecological conversion requires all of these so as to meet the most serious moral challenge of our time.

Professor Sylva has written a major book in what Clifford Geertz terms "blurred genres." By that Geertz means a study that refuses to stay slotted in a specified scholarly discipline, but reaches across such distinctions, in order to face real and complex human issues. As biblical scholarship moves out of its more positivistic modes, it is able to make contact with human dimensions of the text that "objectivist" criticism had long precluded. In this book, Sylva with painstaking research and urbane articulation reflects upon how the Psalms touch fractured human conditions in healing ways. This is no surface interpreation of scripture for the sake of "an easy religious fix", and it is no "pop psychology", because the author has thought with great steadfastness and is informed on both sides of the interface. The power of his argument is in the detail of human stress and in the effective nuance of the poetry. For his interface he employs the intriguing term "theotherapy". I have no doubt that this book will become a major resource for bringing back together text and human reality that our recent interpretative past has rent asunder. Sylva invites us to a new conversation as we "blur" our safer points of reference. Walter Brueggemann Professor of Old Testament, Columbia Theological Seminary This book seeks to uncover the serious and deep ways in which the Psalms speak to the human situation. Few works that I know of have sought to bring the Psalms to bear on the stresses and strains, the functions and dysfunctions of the family as has been done here. Professor Sylva endeavors to show how the Psalms create a fundamental trust in God, a trust that moves out into all other relationships starting with the family. This is something that happened to me as a child and that I came to realize only much later. In this work, The Pslams are clearly not simply a springboard to say some things about family therapy. They are the heart of this book, and it is only as they are heard in detail that one then moves or is carried by them into a more secure family relationship. I hope very much that this work will enhance the reading and appropriation of the Psalms within the family as a source of family health and strength. Patrick D. Miller Professor of Old Testament Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary Dana Sylva is Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at Saint Francis Seminary in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is the editor of "Reimaging the Death of the Lukan Jesus" (1990), and he has published articles on Old testament and New Testament exegesis.