Main description:

Rediscovering Confession is about recovering the experience of confession, in danger now of becoming a lost art. It identifies four elements present in psychotherapy and confession: a state of heightened self-awareness, a growing realization that our predicament points in some meaningful direction beyond itself, the necessity to make a relevant response to our situation, and a potential for spiritual encounter that accompanies the process. Each chapter contains a section devoted to practice, with exercises for individual contemplation and experimentation, guidelines for forming a confessional partnership, directions for conducting discussions in a study goup, and ways to organize a small confessional group.

Contents:

Honest Confession. The Full Confessional Experience. Some Classical Confessions: Augustine and Patrick. More Confessions: Tolstoy and Vonnegut. The Trouble with Adam. The Confessional Relationship. Women in Confession: Julian of Norwich and Margery Kemp. Contemporary Women Confessors: Karen Armstrong and Elaine Pagels. The Enneagram. The Truth of the Matter. More Confessors: Bill Wilson and Recovery. Predicament and Presence in Practice. Forgiveness and Confessional Relationships. Changing Our Mind. The Compassionate Community.