Gary W. Moon – författare

In recent years, many Christian clergy, laity, and mental health professionals have rediscovered the ancient practices of spiritual direction. Seen as a refreshing alternative to the techniques and limitations of modern psychology, such practices offer new insights for pastoral care. But many remain unclear on what spiritual direction is and whether its methods are applicable to their own clients and parishioners.

Spiritual direction is a practice of Christian soul care that is found most notably in the Catholic, Orthodox, and Episcopal traditions but is also present in Wesleyan/Holiness, Pentecostal/charismatic, social justice, and Reformed communities. Predating modern counseling and psychotherapy movements but sharing key principles and insights for spiritual formation, spiritual direction offers significant resources for today's pastors, counselors, therapists, chaplains, and other caregivers attuned to the work of God in people's lives.

In this landmark volume, editors Gary W. Moon and David G. Benner, along with a team of expert contributors, provide a comprehensive survey of spiritual direction in its myriad Christian forms. Specific chapters offer careful historical perspective and contemporary analysis of how Christians from various backgrounds have practiced spiritual direction, with particular attention to each tradition's definition of spiritual direction, the process of authentic transformation, the role of the spiritual director, indicators of mature spirituality, and other aspects of the spiritual direction process. Chapters also provide psychological and clinical insight into how spiritual direction is similar to, different from, and can be integrated with psychotherapy and pastoral counseling to help others experience spiritual transformation and union with God.

ECPA Christian Book Award Finalist; Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Finalist

Everyone who met Dallas Willard was impressed by his personal attention, calm confidence, wisdom, and profound sense of the spiritual. But he was not always the man who seemed to live on a different plane of reality than the rest of us.

Dallas absorbed some of the harshest and most unfair blows life can land. His mother died when he was two, and after his father remarried, he was exiled from his stepmother's home. Growing up in Depression-era, rural Missouri and educated in a one-room schoolhouse, he knew poverty, deprivation, anxiety, self-doubt, and depression. Though the pews he sat in during his early years didn't offer much by way of love and mercy, Dallas, instead of turning away, kept looking for the company of a living, present, and personal God.

In Gary W. Moon's candid and inspiring biography, we see how Dallas's love of learning took him to Baylor University, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Southern California, where he became a beloved professor and one of the most versatile members of the philosophy department as well as a personal mentor to hundreds of pastors, philosophers, and average churchgoers.