FINDING OURSELVES LOST

This book wrestles with quandaries of pastoral ministry in what psychotherapist Mary Pipher calls the age of overwhelm. Drawing especially from the wisdom of Jesus own teaching and healing ministries as portrayed in the Gospel of Luke, it offers an intimate narrative introduction to pastoral theology for guiding bewildering tasks of pastoral care and counseling. These essays encourage seminarians and ministers to embrace their role as agents of healing by exploring their own debilitating shame and daring to speak what in childhood could not be spoken, by revealing their discoveries to a trusted confidant so as to feel less loathsome or lonely, by attending to even minute individual differences, in self and others, that fuel social isolation, and by believing in those persons who first believed in them. While this age of overwhelm floods individuals with streams of anxiety that flow from every direction, in this beautiful book Robert C. Dykstra throws us a life raft by fighting zombies in our midst, giving us permission to be sexual, and liberating our imagination, showing us the way back to God as one who delights in us. We would be lost without Dykstra. --Nathan Carlin, Associate Professor of Medical Humanities and Ethics, and Chair of the Faculty, McGovern Medical School In culling the wisdom of Donald Capps, Dumbledore, Mister Rogers, and others, Robert Dykstra has woven together a series of choice essays that evince the protean resources available to the pastoral theologian. Certainly, when such resources are used with care, as is the case with Finding Ourselves Lost, we discover that there is, indeed, a cloud of witnesses ready to comfort us in this age of overwhelm. --Jay-Paul Hinds, Assistant Professor of Pastoral Care, The Divinity School, Howard University In an age of professionalism and specialists, the human predicament of isolation, disconnection, even that of being lost, threatens our spiritual, emotional, and physical wellbeing. The