Latest from the Wayne Oates Institute
Pastoral Care for Bereaved Parents Topic of May Seminar
After the Newtown and Aurora shootings, and the bombing of the Boston Marathon, many of us are reflecting on what we say to parents whose child has died. We may be ready to talk with grieving children, or spouses, but parents are not supposed to survive their children. The fact is that many do and it is a difficult and terrible grief to endure. Through writings and movies this seminar explores this experience and some avenues for providing pastoral and spiritual care to bereaved parents. This online seminar will be offered May 6-24 is for chaplains, counselors, and pastors. It is a seminar about how to provide care for a lingering grief that requires an informed and sensitive approach.
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- Published: 20 April 2013
Barbara Brown Taylor book featured in May Seminar
How often have we heard the phrase, "I'm spiritual, but not religious"? Episcopal priest (and writer) Barbara Brown Taylor writes in her memoir, Leaving Church, of losing her faith with the church and much of religion, but not with God. In her very down-to-earth way, Taylor shares what many of us have felt, and perhaps struggled in guilt over, as we seek to reconcile our work, faith, and church affiliations. In the May 6-24 online seminar on Spiritual but not Religious: Leaving Church, participants have the opportunity to reflect on Taylor's perspectives and their own experiences with others who are no longer seeing church as the avenue for meeting their spiritual needs.
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- Published: 20 April 2013
New Membership Features Are Coming
Welcome to the NEW Oates Institute website! We hope you like it. We've spent more than six months working on our web site, and look to be continuing this journey for the near future. Due to the attack on the Oates Institute by hackers, the website got yet another round of improvement this spring. In addition, we are taking this opportunity to move to a new membership platform. We are very excited and hopeful that this move will allow us to reduce the average membership processing time, currently 20+ minutes of staff time entering information into the seven (7) databases that serve our members.
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- Published: 11 April 2013
Seminar on Pastoral Care and Suicide Added in May
In light of the current discussion around suicide currently taking place in the United States, we are adding a seminar in May to provide help with pastoral responses to suicide. The seminar explores the nature of depression that can lead to suicide, the effects it can have on family and friends, and community resources that are available for help. The seminar will be held online May 6-24 and provide participants with 12 contact hours of continuing education credit as well as a deeper understanding of the topic.
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- Published: 11 April 2013
Register Now for May Online Seminars
May is coming and with it the second group of spring online seminars at the Oates Institute. This is an exciting lineup of seminars with topics ranging from palliative care to being spiritual but not religious to providing care for bereaved parents. The seminars will run May 6-24, and each offers 12 contact hours of continuing education credit for chaplains, counselors, social workers, and pastors. It is a great time and opportunity to participate in continuing education from wherever you are according to your schedule.
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- Published: 07 April 2013
Palliative Care Seminar Offered Again in May
At the request and encouragement of prior participants in this seminar, we are offering Chris Hammon's seminar on Breaking the Myths: Spirituality and Palliative Care one more time in 2013. This three week online seminar will be offered May 6-24 and registration is limited to 12 persons. While the presenter continues to explore this topic both as a pastoral educator and as a palliative care patient, participants will be invited to engage in conversation around how this field is changing and the opportunities for spiritual care.
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- Published: 06 April 2013
Back Online with a New Look for Spring
Over St. Patrick's Day weekend the Oates Institute's main website was attacked by people wanting to turn our site into a source for malware. Since this is our primary campus, it was a serious problem. We caught the problem quickly and took care of the threat. However, some of our foundations were damaged in the process. Thankfully, we were able to restore the site from our backup, but we were no longer able to make changes to it.
During this time, Google also took notice and promptly put a big warning and a block on the Oates Institute's site. Many of you noticed this and let us know. We thank you for that. And we thank you for standing by patiently as we rebuilt the site. The new site is up and the Google warnings are gone.
Bringing forth new life and a fresh look seems appropriate for this season, and we will be continuing to explore that.
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- Published: 02 April 2013
Psychosis: A Service User's Perspective
An autoethnographical account of a psychiatric patient’s experience and its relevance to chaplains.
When researchers do autoethnography, they retrospectively and selectively write about epiphanies that stem from, or are made possible by, being part of a culture and/or by possessing a particular cultural identity. (Ellis et al, 2011)
It was a particularly stressful time that summer of 1998. My mother had just died and my only sister had been told her breast cancer was back and she didn’t have long to live.
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- Published: 22 March 2013