Helping the Good Shepherd: Pastoral Counselors in a Psychotherapeutic Culture, 1925-1975

This history of Protestant pastoral counseling in America examines the role of pastoral counselors in the construction and articulation of a liberal moral sensibility. Analyzing the relationship between religion and science in the twentieth century, Susan E. Myers—Shirk locates this sensibility in the counselors’ intellectual engagement with the psychological sciences.

Informed by the principles of psychology and psychoanalysis, pastoral counselors sought a middle ground between science and...