Rediscovering Confession

The Practice of Forgiveness and Where it Leads

David A. Steere

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135841270
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Rediscovering Confession is about recovering the experience of confession, in danger now of becoming a lost art. It identifies four elements present in psychotherapy and confession: a state of heightened self-awareness, a growing realization that our predicament points in some meaningful direction beyond itself, the necessity to make a relevant response to our situation, and a potential for spiritual encounter that accompanies the process. Each chapter contains a section devoted to practice, with exercises for individual contemplation and experimentation, guidelines for forming a confessional partnership, directions for conducting discussions in a study goup, and ways to organize a small confessional group.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Honest Confession
• 2. The Full Confessional Experience
• 3. Some Classical Confessions: Augustine and Patrick
• 4. More Confessions: Tolstoy and Vonnegut
• 5. The Trouble with Adam
• 6. The Confessional Relationship
• 7. Women in Confession: Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe
• 8. Contemporary Women Confessors: Karen Armstrong and Elaine Pagels
• 9. The Enneagram
• 10. The Truth of the Matter
• 11. More Confessors: Bill Wilson and Recovery
• 12. Predicament and Presence in Practice
• 13. Forgiveness and Confessional Relationships
• 14. Changing Our Minds
• 15. The Compassionate Community
• Index