1. Neuroscience: The Organizing System For Experience And
Meaning-Making
2. Deconstructing and Reconstructing Understandings of Self
3. A Working Theory of Wellness
4. Performativity And Plasticity: Storying Self Bi-Directionally In
The Embodied Brain Ecosystem
5. Theoretical and Therapeutic Implications
6. A Theraputic Framework: A Case for Short-Term Clincial Skills in
Spiritual Care and Counseling Contexts
William D. Roozeboom is adjunct professor of practical theology and spiritual care and counseling at Fuller Theological Seminary and Claremont School of Theology. He is also a certified pastoral counselor with the American Association of Pastoral Counselors (AAPC), a staff counselor and congregational and community liaison at Christian Counseling Service, and supervisory and interim pastor at Bethany Reformed Church.
Roozeboom provides clergy, chaplains, and others engaged in
pastoral care a window into the dramatic implications of
neuroscience to help us better understand the embodied ecosystem
within which the brain is highly responsive and intricately
interrelated to spiritual, personal, and relational wellbeing.
Roozeboom demonstrates the pivotal role for practices of self-care
in this embodied ecosystem including not only renewing and
supporting physical and spiritual well-being but also enhancing our
capacities for the practice of neighbor love.
*Nancy J. Ramsay, Brite Divinity School*
Roozeboom offers a vibrant reminder to all of us concerned with the
spiritual well-being of persons (and to those of us working at the
intersection of pastoral theology and the neurosciences): what we
do is as important to who we are as what we think and feel. Moving
beyond the "top-down" models of contemplative practice, this text
convincingly draws on neuroscience research to demonstrate that our
physical and religious practices also "flow upward," reshaping our
brains/minds/souls and relationships in profound ways.
*David A. Hogue, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary*
In an age when we are being invited to revisit human identity and
relationality and the contributions, especially of the sciences, to
concepts of embodiment, Roozeboom’s book offers fresh hope for
pastoral care by helping to derail the unsurmountable tendency left
in the wake of dualistic anthropological models that have plagued
Christian theology and its caring practices.
His thorough and easily accessible analysis of the science of how
the inherent capacity of the “embodied brain ecosystem” constructs
and continually works towards wholeness as humans engage in
practices of wellness by which they induce the neuroplasticity of
the brain allows for caring for others while caring for the self
and doing both with integrity. This is no small feat as recent
accounts of clergy burnout demonstrate.
However, Roozeboom has offered a candid appraisal of the terrain
and shone light on the fault lines, largely in our anthropology,
and helps us navigate this fascinating yet difficult arena in human
health and wholeness, by returning us to the primitive body and how
daily practices of wellness as we love and care for the body,
without the oft essentializing and objectifying that accompanies
self-care rhetoric, facilitate pastoral care encounters. This is
pastoral care as self-care simplified and doable.
*Esther E. Acolatse, Duke University Divinity School*
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