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.

• Portraits of Forgiveness to Exhibit in San Antonio
• Deadline for Fall Pastoral Care Specialist Certificate Extended to August 15
• Clinical Truth and Spiritual Truth: Are They the Same?
• Healing Power of Story Listening
• Integrating Spirituality and Health
• New Oates Journal Columnist: Bob Ferguson on Preaching and Pastoral Care
• In the WEOI Bookstore
  

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Portraits of Forgiveness to Exhibit in San Antonio

Deadline for Fall Pastoral Care Specialist Certificate Extended to August 15

The deadline for applying to be part of the Fall 2009 Pastoral Care Specialist Certificate group has been extended to August 15. This peer group will study and reflect together through four core seminars and the Pastoral Care Practicum to earn the Pastoral Care Specialist Certificate. The first seminar for this group, Introduction to the Ministry of Pastoral Care and Counseling, begins on September 8.

Read more and Apply

Clinical Truth and Spiritual Truth: Are They the Same?

Read more and make reservations

Healing Power of Story Listening

One of the Oates Institute's most popular seminars over the last five years, the Healing Power of Story Listening, will be offered September 8-October 16. This six week online seminar presented by the Rev. Canon Marlin Whitmer takes stories that are heard as a basis for reflecting on metaphors and metaphorical patterns. These metaphors and metaphorical patterns also serve to connect with Biblical stories and one's own stories. This is a seminar experience that relates the fundamentals of language and word to pastoral care and health care as it moves out into the community with chronic illness overshadowing acute care. Both are grounded on listening, language, and metaphor.

Click here for more information and to register

Integrating Spirituality and Health

As society recognizes the fragmentation of care for the body, mind, spirit, and soul, the need to integrate spirituality as an important dimension of health and healing becomes evident. Such an integrative approach, as Carl Middleton writes, "is comprehensive, collaborative, personalized, and based on a multi-dimensional view of the patient." Integrating Spirituality and Health--one of the Oates Institute's signature online seminars for chaplains, nurses, physicians, social workers, and others working in health care--will be offered September 8-October 16, facilitated by Carl Aiken, Coordinating Chaplain at The Women's and Children's Hospital in Adelaide, South Australia.

Click here for more information and to register

New Oates Journal Columnist: Bob Ferguson on Preaching and Pastoral Care

Bob Ferguson joins the Oates Journal as a columnist this week writing on Preaching and Pastoral Care. Bob is the pastor of the Emerywood Baptist Church, High Point, North Carolina.  A native of Louisiana, he is a graduate of Samford University (1973) and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Master of Divinity, 1977, Ph.D., 1981).  Bob has been the pastor of churches in Kentucky, Alabama, South Carolina, and now North Carolina.  His doctoral work was in homiletics, ethics, and contemporary theology, and his dissertation focused on the relationship between preaching and social issues.  He has been noted as one who is able to tackle thorny “hot button” issues in such a manner as to provide a deeper understanding of the formative matters.

In his first column, he addresses a concern over prophetic preaching in an age of crisis and offers four recommendations for interaction and dialogue.  (Read more)

Also new in the Oates Journal:

Ethical Boundaries in Professional Practice:
Revisiting an Old Concern through Natural Reflection
by C. Roy Woodruff, Ph.D.

At the time of this writing I am deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, in a cabin perched beside the rushing Rapidan River, near its headwaters in the Shenandoah National Park.  The only sound I hear is the constant flow of the river as it tumbles over rocks in its journey to eventually join the Rappahannock River and the Chesapeake Bay.  The only other soul within seven miles is my wife, luckily my soul-mate for 47 years.  We’ve been coming to this spot for 35 years, and it is sacred space for us. (Read more)

Have You Been to the WEOI Bookstore Lately? Check It Out:

Workaholic in Recovery Mug

The Struggle To Be Free

Care of Troublesome People

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