by Fr. Stephen Muse
This remarkable book is the fruit of Fr. Stephen Muse's many years of clinical experience and deep Christian faith. An accomplished psychotherapist and a man of strong Orthodox conviction, he brings into genuine dialogue the insights of contemporary psychological science and the Eastern Christian spiritual tradition, navigating with rare skill the false dilemmas that so often burden this terrain.
Fr. Muse does not attempt to construct an artificial Orthodox psychotherapy as an ideological entity, but achieves something far more valuable: he allows his Orthodox Christian commitment to inspire and illumine every dimension of his therapeutic work, while at the same time giving secular knowledge its full due. In this way, the Church is never reduced to a sect, and science is never reduced to a flattening of human mystery into neurotransmitters and symptom-focused advice.
The governing metaphor of the book is hospitality, understood in its deepest biblical and existential sense. Just as Abraham and Sarah welcomed unknown strangers to their table and encountered the living God, the pastoral counselor is called to recognize the presence of an Unseen Guest in every therapeutic encounter. Pastoral counseling thus becomes a reciprocal relationship: the therapist enters the sacred tent of another person's soul, where their most precious treasures are kept and their deepest shame and heartache lie buried, and in that meeting, both are transformed.
The book is addressed, with equal seriousness and courage, to two distinct audiences: clinicians and priests/pastors. Through a rich variety of topics, drawing on personal existential experience as well as broad theological and psychological learning, the author returns again and again to the same central question: Is our pastoral and/or clinical praxis truly existential? Does it change us? Do we truly meet the other person, and in doing so, meet Christ?
ISBN: 978-0-9905029-7-5
by Fr. Stephen Muse
This remarkable book is the fruit of Fr. Stephen Muse's many years of clinical experience and deep Christian faith. An accomplished psychotherapist and a man of strong Orthodox conviction, he brings into genuine dialogue the insights of contemporary psychological science and the Eastern Christian spiritual tradition, navigating with rare skill the false dilemmas that so often burden this terrain.
Fr. Muse does not attempt to construct an artificial Orthodox psychotherapy as an ideological entity, but achieves something far more valuable: he allows his Orthodox Christian commitment to inspire and illumine every dimension of his therapeutic work, while at the same time giving secular knowledge its full due. In this way, the Church is never reduced to a sect, and science is never reduced to a flattening of human mystery into neurotransmitters and symptom-focused advice.
The governing metaphor of the book is hospitality, understood in its deepest biblical and existential sense. Just as Abraham and Sarah welcomed unknown strangers to their table and encountered the living God, the pastoral counselor is called to recognize the presence of an Unseen Guest in every therapeutic encounter. Pastoral counseling thus becomes a reciprocal relationship: the therapist enters the sacred tent of another person's soul, where their most precious treasures are kept and their deepest shame and heartache lie buried, and in that meeting, both are transformed.
The book is addressed, with equal seriousness and courage, to two distinct audiences: clinicians and priests/pastors. Through a rich variety of topics, drawing on personal existential experience as well as broad theological and psychological learning, the author returns again and again to the same central question: Is our pastoral and/or clinical praxis truly existential? Does it change us? Do we truly meet the other person, and in doing so, meet Christ?
ISBN: 978-0-9905029-7-5
