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Paperback - 259 pp
ISBN 0800626737
Fortress Press

Editorial Reviews

This book is an excellent and richly meaningful resource for the practice, learning, and reaching pastoral counseling.  Experientially focused, it joins theological and psychological theory and practice with the fruits of brain research in a compelling challenge to personal and professional integration and depth.

Bonnie Niswander
Luther General Hospital, Park Ridge, Illinois

James Ashbrook has collated forty years of experience and wisdom into a highly practical exposition of pastoral care.  His book is full of ripe examples that illuminate coherent principles to guide the novice and gratify the expert professional.

Robert Lyman Porter, M.D.

James Ashbrook has written his magnum opus in Minding the Soul, in which he shares his intellectual spiritual, and emotional journey of mind, heart, and soul for persons in the field of pastoral care and counseling.  He not only takes the soul seriously as a centerpiece for the understanding of human personality, he also integrates, as no other pastoral psychologist does, the relevant ideas from physiology and brain research.  Minding the Soul will help expand and to deepen our understanding of the nature of pastoral counseling and the human being.

Merle Jordan
Prof. of Pastoral Psychology, Boston University

Ashbrook's writing 'rocks' the reader with a wonderfully constructed vision of pastoral counseling as a specialized ministry.  Steeped in biblical metaphor and presented with psychology and neuro-science as informing primary disciplines, this mature and playful work can teach the novice or experienced counselor.

Maxine Glaz
Presbyterian/St. Luke's Medical Center, Denver

As a parish pastor, I am many times on the frontline during unfolding crisis, grief, or trauma.  Jim Ashworth's book has given me an opportunity to remember who I am in order to be a 'rock' to those hurting.  Through alive and revealing metaphors, Dr. Ashbrook has opened up a creative way of looking at pastoral care and counseling, interweaving traditional therapeutic language with spiritual language and reflection.

Timothy J. Bagwell
Senior Pastor, Martha Bowman Memorial U. M. C., Macon, Georgia