Böcker av Professor E Brooks Holifield

Here, for the first time, the development of pastoral care as a discipline has been documented. Dr. Holifield details the shift in emphasis from saving souls to supporting individuals in self-realization, and in the process raises thought-provoking questions about the preoccupation with psychological methodology evident in modern society and clergy. Every pastor wittingly or unwittingly adopts some ''theory'' of pastoral counseling, whether it be derived from the seventeenth century or from the twentieth, says Dr. Holifield. From colonial America''s intellectual approach to today''s therapeutic self culture, he explores those theories. Theological, social, economic, and psychological threads are interwoven with fascinating conversational examples to show how Protestantism helped to form--and was influenced by--changing social orders. Broad in scope, scholarly in detail, yet immensely readable, this is an important book for clinical pastoral educators, students, professionals--everyone interested in church and social history.E. Brooks Holifield is the C. H. Candler Professor of American Church History at Emory University in Atlanta. He is the author of six books, including ''The Gentlemen Theologians'' (1978), ''A History of Pastoral Care in America'' (1983), ''Era of Persuasion'' (1989), and ''Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War'' (2003). He is also the former president of the American Society of Church History.

Professor Holifield locates the southern theologians in their broader American setting and in the context of European debates about reason, revelation, science, and moral philosophy. He thus explores a wide range of topics that clarify the history of southern--and American--religion: the presuppositions of liberalism and the logic of conservatism; the influence of Scottish Common-Sense Philosophers, British theologians, and German Biblical critics; the foundations and functions of southern social ethics; the didactic uses of ritual; and the continuing effort of nineteenth-century theologians to demonstrate the reasonableness of both the Christian religion and the whole natural order.""In this minutely documented study, Professor Holifield, a brilliant . . . scholar, demolishes the myth that the Old South's clergy were ardent devotees of emotional religion but showed very little interest in a rational faith. In fact, the urban areas contained a considerable number of Catholic and Protestant leaders who were well acquainted with theological developments on the Continent and in Great Britain, and who produced carefully reasoned works in theology and moral philosophy. To be sure, their patterns of thought were predominantly orthodox, but they were by no means uncritical of the various types of orthodoxy. Professor Holifield has opened important new vistas on southern theology, and his penetrating exploration demands serious attention.""--H. Shelton Smith, Duke UniversityE. Brooks Holifield is C. H. Candler Professor of American Church History, Candler School of Theology, Emory University. His first book was The Covenant Sealed: The Development of Puritan Sacramental Theology in Old and New England, 1570-1720.