The Indispensable Guide to Pastoral Care (Peterson)

Teaching Pastoral Care

What is pastoral care? Being present to others in a loving way. A relationship rooted beyond yourself, and what you say and do in this relationship. 

Sound complicated?

Sharyl B. Peterson recognizes that -- as students learn more about specific areas of care, facilitating pastoral conversations, making hospital visits and planning funerals, offering bereavement care, and celebrating weddings and births -- they also learn to draw connections to care and its theological foundations. The Indispensable Guide to Pastoral Care helps to link these elements by helping you to practice pastoral caregiving while you learn to explore various areas of care.

About the Author

Sharyl B. Peterson, senior minister at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Grand Junction, Colorado, teaches in the Theological Education Institute. She earned her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Denver and her M.Div. from Iliff School of Theology, and has completed seven units of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), including three units of supervisory CPE. She was a college and university professor for over fifteen years.