Through the Eyes of Women: Insights for Pastoral Care

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Summary: Towards better pastoral care for women
Review: In Through the Eyes of Women: Insights for Pastoral Care editor Jeanne Stevenson Moessner has worked together to compile feminist insights for pastoral care with women from a variety of professional manifestations of pastoral caring: professors of pastoral theology or psychology, ordained ministers, pastoral counselors, pastoral psychotherapists, chaplains, Clinical Pastoral Education supervisors, and a religious Director of a program in Christian Spirituality. In three parts, "The Eyes of Understanding," "Insights for Pastoral Care," and "Visions of Home" the various authors present revised viewpoints on pastoral theology and pastoral care & counseling, which complexify and expand theoretical and practical issues in the fields from feminist and womanist perspectives. Each of the authors challenges the dominant metaphor handed down by early founder of Clinical Pastoral Education, Anton Boisen, that the subject of pastoral theology is the "living human document." Following Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore's proposed new metaphor of the "living human web," each of the authors offers her own particular emendations in light of contextual issues of race/ethnicity, gender socialization, class, age, sexuality/sexual identity, and relationship with ministry and the church. They also, in the second section, offer pastoral care suggestions vis-à-vis some issues specific to women seeking pastoral care, including rape, hysterectomy, mastectomy, anger and aggression, motherloss, eating disorders, older women's secrets, and lesbianism.

Throughout, they seek to write pastoral theology and offer pastoral care from a "feminist sensibility" or that is "female-friendly." Beyond this-and this is the importance of the web metaphor-they seek to overcome individualistic biases in pastoral theology and pastoral care & counseling inherited from various psychological traditions and begin to bring to bear sex, race, and class analyses on particular care situations. While urging those in care professions to attune themselves to issues specific to the individual women who seek care (and urging women to develop the capacity for self-love in balance with self-giving or -sacrificial love), the authors also name the importance of seeing the individual women within influences of a larger socio-cultural context. More than this, they often exhort the importance of seeing pastoral care engage in systemic change.

Almost all the authors write as white, middle-class, and Protestant women who hope their contributions will encourage others to respond from various racial/ethnic and social locations. Overall, this is an important and helpful contribution to the field both theoretically and practically.