The Wayne E. Oates Institute is a Connected Learning Community exploring spirituality and health as a way to advance integrative care for the whole person. The Oates Institute is a non-profit educational organization made up of caregivers from the medical, spiritual and counseling communities providing a forum for joining together as an interdisciplinary dialogue toward understanding the relationship between spirituality and the healing process.

That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis will be the focus of the Fiction as a Pathway to the Spirit seminar being offered online in January. This seminar, which enables participants to gain new perspectives about spirituality in fiction and acquire new ways to observe reflections of contemporary spirituality in fiction, is offered by Chaplain Jan Waples. She points out that this seminar will explore That Hideous Strength in terms of moral theology and ethics, spirituality, faith, good and evil in daily living, the workplace, and in our relationships.

Although this seminar is really for those who are willing to read the book (more required reading than usual in these seminars), participants will be glad they did!  That Hideous Strength is readily and cheaply available in paperback, at your library or from any used book source. Now is the time to start reading!

The seminar presenter is Jan Waples, a Board Certified Chaplain in Henderson, Nevada, and an Episcopal priest canonically resident in the Episcopal Diocese of California, where she served in a San Francisco parish setting before becoming a professional chaplain. She is a published academic writer (and continues to write) in the field of spirituality and healing in contemporary fiction, with her coauthor, Bill Kupersmith. Jan holds an M.A. in History from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, an M.Div. from University of California at Berkeley (the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in the Graduate Theological Union) and the University of Oxford, UK, and completed her clinical residency in C.P.E. at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

This seminar features the Oates Institute's Connected Learning approach and is limited to 12 participants. Members of the Oates Institute may register for free; others may register for only $60.

It offers 12 contact hours of continuing education for ministers, counselors, chaplains, and social workers. To qualify for the CEUs participants are expected to read the presentations and participate in the email discussion by contributing at least 2 email messages per week. One message is to reflect on the presentations or case studies in light of one's personal experience and context and the second is to respond to someone else’s reflection or inquiry.

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