The religious and moral foundations of pastoral counseling

This paper explores the significant issues related to the articulation of distinctions between pastoral counseling and the secular psychotherapies. The argument is made that pastoral counseling can be distinguished from the secular psychotherapies because the former is grounded in the moral vision of the religious traditions as well as the growing body of clinical knowledge the secular psychotherapies have made available to the culture. A dialectical model of moral inquiry is then presented as the most adequate for the pastoral counseling enterprise to carry out its inescapable moral task.