The religiosity variable and personal empowerment in pastoral counseling.

Abstract

Claims that therapeutic fuzziness and unexplored assumptions contribute to an all-too-ready devaluing or dismissal of what is important to religious clients. Argues that sorting out the client's religiosity components into facets of religion, spirituality, and theology to reflect respectively the process, capacity, and product of meaning-making serves to shed light on why consideration of religiosity is important in therapy. Notes that such processes of discernment provide a bridge between the sciences (e.g. psychology) and humanitarian (e.g. religiosity) endeavors in that both engage in the same meta-process of meaning-making in their search for empowerment, although they do so from different perspectives and different initial suppositions. Concludes that the art of psychotherapy can draw on the content of both science and religiosity to facilitate well-being in clients and in therapists alike.