Alerts clergy and pastoral counselors to the role of child abuse reporting requirements in their pastoral care and counseling ministries. Outlines the rationale for child abuse reporting statutes, noting particularly the "spiritual healing exception"; and explains how penalties can be imposed for those who fail to comply with statutes.

Pastoral Psychology is one of the oldest and most well established academic journals in the field of psychology and religion/spirituality. Since 1950, the journal offers an international interdisciplinary forum for the publication of original papers that discuss the work of caring for, understanding, and exploring human beings as persons, in families, in small groups, and in community. This pee...

Most off-the-shelf basic methodological tools currently used in pastoral development (e.g. technical definitions and conventional scales of observation) retain underlying assumptions about stability and uniformity being the norm (i.e. 'equilibrium thinking'). Such assumptions reflect a theoretical framework which had been questioned since the 1970s and was openly disproved in scientific circles...

1,$78-1N>>+("#>(-:"& & ABSTRA&T In this paper, we report findings from a study of American Christian ministers’ uses of technologies in religious practices. We focus on the use of technologies for spiritual purposes as opposed to pragmatic and logistical, but report on all. We present results about the uses of technologies in three aspects of religious work: religious study and reflection, chur...

The scientific and conceptual contributions Jim Ellis made throughout the course of his career reveal a logical progression towards increased understanding of pastoral ecosystems worldwide. Research in wildlife, large herbivores, systems ecology and energy flows through grazing ecosystems formed the basis of his approach. A leader of the South Turkana Ecosystem Project (STEP), he showed the ada...

This study analyzes trends in the health care literature based on electronic searches of MEDLINE between the years 1980 and 2006. The search terms used were "spiritual care," "pastoral care," and "chaplain.*" The results document an expected surge in the rate of English-language journal articles about spiritual care beginning in the mid 1990s. Although the rate of articles about pastoral care w...

The first part of the article looks into the contribution of Christianity to health care in the Middle Ages. In those times, monasteries used to take care of the sick, pilgrims, and travellers. The second part brings interesting information about health care institutions from the church history of Rijeka. Local circumstances favoured setting up an infirmary in St Sebastian's street. Adjacent to...

Regarded as a highly contagious, zoonotic disease with worldwide distribution, brucellosis is endemic in many countries and settings and is responsible for a considerable economic and health-related burden. Limited information is available on the persistence and prevalence of brucellosis in pastoral communities, due to the difficulty in gathering information and to their mobility. However, sinc...

River water quality in New Zealand is at great risk of impairment in low elevation catchments because of pervasive land-use changes, yet there has been no nationwide assessment of the state of these rivers. Data from the surface-water monitoring programmes of 15 regional councils and unitary authorities, and the National River Water Quality Network were used to assess the recent state (1998–200...