This guide is indispensible for Pagan clergy, and will be referred to again and again for the wealth of counseling wisdom that is difficult to find anywhere else. From basic counseling skills through crisis intervention, marital and family counseling, grief and other transitional issues, Kevin is there to hold your hand, provide insights into behaviors and motivations, and guide you around the pitfalls and problems inherent in any counseling relationship. The unique aspects of counseling those with developing psychic or magickal abilities are handled with common sense and caution, helping the counselor to discriminate between psychic and psychotic, and to handle the effects of magickal workings. Long awaited and desperately needed, this little volume may well prove to be THE guide for Priests and Priestesses in any counseling role. -Rhiannon, Wiccan Priestess, Co-founder of "SerpentStone", Psychiatric Nurse, BSN (Bachelor of Science in Nursing), Master of Science in Counseling.

Creating and maintaining balance in the 21st century can be difficult. We are inundated with noise to distract us. Warriors of the Millennium quiet this noise so that they can make choices that are in one's own interest. Take back control of your life from those who would take it from you.

"The Wiccan Minister's Manual, A Guide For Priests and Priestesses, " was inspired as a training aid for those who would like to become Wiccan Ministers, as well as an aid for Wiccan/Pagan Priests and Priestesses. The Craft is evolving, becoming more and more accepted by society, and there is beginning to be a definite distinction between Wiccan Laity and Wiccan Clergy. Part One - Guidance - Making the spiritual connection to personal deity through love, prayer, meditation, ritual, and myth and how to guide others to create their own personal connections. Part Two - Wiccan religious philosophy and guidance - How to live a spiritual life in the modern world. Part Three - various methods of healing mind, body and spirit - Including some legal pit-falls to avoid, plus chapter eleven presents an extensive discourse on Pastoral Counseling. Part Four deals with psychic self-defense and rituals of protection. Including House Clearings, Banishings, and Exorcism. Additionally, the author explains what to look for and what to look out for while determining if an exorcism is really needed or if the client is suffering from psychosis and is in need of a professional therapist. Part Five focuses upon the spiritual support roles. It covers, dealing with death and dying, Funerals, Prison Ministry, Legal requirements of doing Handfastings in all 50 states, plus a discourse on whether or not to incorporate. This work begins to fill yet another gap in this area of the Wiccan religious structure as it brings back much of the older knowledge and philosophy that seems to be waning from the collective Wiccan memory. Reviewed by Edain McCoy; "Kevin, I received my copy of "Wiccan Minister's Manual Its terrific! You cover everything... Personally, I think you did a great job at making your book useful to all trads."

This is THE handbook for Clergy of the Wiccan faith. Additionally, this work would also prove to be a great aid to all other Pagan paths. There is currently no other book of this sort on the market. With Handfasting, and funeral services, guided meditations and spiritual messages this book will be used again and again. A Handbook For Wiccan Clergy" is a valuable tool for all High Priests and High Priestesses of whatever tradition to have and utilize. Far from being a Wiccan 101, or "spell" book, this work is only intended for advanced practitioners. "A Handbook For Wiccan Clergy," continues to pull in rave reviews, HealingWolf of FaDraSha has said; "This is a "must have" book for more advanced witches. If you ever counsel others or act as high priest(ess), you'll want this great reference book." Edain McCoy has also read this work and has proclaimed it as "Wonderful" and It is well past time that a book of this type should be available. Serpent Stone said; "This book is a wonderful guide for both new and experienced Priests and Priestesses, and covers areas as varied as Rites of Passage, mythology (including techniques and rituals for connecting with the ideas, teaching and energies of the myth), meditations, personal growth and awareness, and pastoral counseling. All of these are areas that have been sadly lacking in any comprehensive volume before this, but which are essential to working effectively as clergy." And most recently from Marlevane's Book Reviews This book gets right down to business. Kevin (Temple of Ishtar) writes this book geared towards rituals for performing all rites of passages. No Wiccan Priest or Priestess should be without this book in their collections! This book is a real gem to the Pagan world and to all magickal practitioners."

Personal empowerment in the face of planetary despair

From Executive summary: This report focuses on the government's efforts to enforce federal civil rights laws prohibiting religious discrimination in the administration and management of federal and state prisons. Prisoners in federal and state institutions retain certain religious exercise rights under the Constitution and statutes including the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUPIPA), the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), and the Civil rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA). Many states have similar provisions in their state constitutions and in state law modeled on RFRA. These rights must be balanced with the legitimate concerns of prisons officials, including cost, staffing, and most importantly, prison safety and security. Reconciling these rights and concerns can be a significant challenge for penal institutions, as well as courts.

John Piper pleads with fellow pastors to abandon the professionalization of the pastorate and pursue the prophetic call of the Bible for radical ministry.

From handshakes and toasts to chant and genuflection, ritual pervades our social interactions and religious practices. Still, few of us could identify all of our daily and festal ritual behaviors, much less explain them to an outsider. Similarly, because of the variety of activities that qualify as ritual and their many contradictory yet, in many ways, equally legitimate interpretations, ritual seems to elude any systematic historical and comparative scrutiny. In this book, Catherine Bell offers a practical introduction to ritual practice and its study; she surveys the most influential theories of religion and ritual, the major categories of ritual activity, and the key debates that have shaped our understanding of ritualism. Bell refuses to nail down ritual with any one definition or understanding. Instead, her purpose is to reveal how definitions emerge and evolve and to help us become more familiar with the interplay of tradition, exigency, and self-expression that goes into constructing this complex social medium.

"Lewis struck me as the most thoroughly converted man I ever met," observes Walter Hooper in the preface to this collection of essays by C.S. Lewis. "His whole vision of life was such that the natural and the supernatural seemed inseparably combined. "It is precisely this pervasive Christianity which is demonstrated in the forty-eight essays comprising God in the Dock. Here Lewis addresses himself both to theological questions and to those which Hooper terms "semi-theological," or ethical. But whether he is discussing "Evil and God," "Miracles," "The Decline of Religion," or "The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment," his insight and observations are thoroughly and profoundly Christian. Drawn from a variety of sources, the essays were designed to meet a variety of needs, and among other accomplishments they serve to illustrate the many different angles from which we are able to view the Christian religion. They range from relatively popular pieces written for newspapers to more learned defenses of the faith which first appeared in The Socratic Digest. Characterized by Lewis's honesty and realism, his insight and conviction, and above all his thoroughgoing commitments to Christianity, these essays make God in the Dock very much a book for our time.--Amazon.com.

The story of Father Ed Dowling, S.J., the Jesuit priest who served for twenty years as sponsor and spiritual guide to Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. An icy evening in December 1940 saw the first meeting of two extraordinary spiritual leaders. Father Ed said that the graces he received from meeting Bill Wilson were as great as those he had received from his ordination as a priest, and Bill in turn described encountering the Jesuit as being like a second conversion experience, where he could feel the transcendent presence of God filling the entire room with grace. The good priest taught Wilson about St. Ignatius Loyolas Spiritual Exercises, about the eternal battle between good and evil which the Spanish saint described in that book, and explained the Jesuit understanding of the way we can use our deepest emotions to receive guidance from God while serving on that battlefield. The co-founder of the twelve step movement in turn supplied Father Ed with some of the most valuable tools he possessed for carrying out small group therapy on a wide range of different kinds of troubled people. Together the two men discussed Poulains Graces of Interior Prayer and Bills attempts to make spiritual contact with both spooks and saints, and explored the world of LSD experiences and the teachings of the Catholic, Hindu, and Buddhist mystics in Aldous Huxleys Perennial Philosophy. And we will see how Father Ed, with his deep social conscience, helped Bill W. turn his book on the Twelve Traditions into a Bill of Rights for the twelve step movement, and how he laid out his own spiritual vision of Alcoholics Anonymous at the A.A. International in St. Louis in 1955.