Customer Reviews

Sacred Calling, Secular Accountability: Law and Ethics in Complementary and Spiritual Counseling

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I'm a licensed clinical social worker in hospice, with a private practice in money therapy (working with clients on the psychological and spiritual issues underlying their money problems). I speak on the subject of spirituality in social work practice, and was delighted to come across a reference to this book while doing research. It addresses the ethical and legal issues social workers need to consider if they plan to utilize a spiritual or complementary context for, or interventions in, their work (I prefer Edward Canda's alternate term, "cultivations"). This is the only text of its kind of which I'm aware, and it's helped me to deepen and solidify the ethical component of my presentations. I especially enjoyed the discussion on the First Amendment and the idea of an "ethical ecology" (which I teach, but do not express in these terms; nevertheless, it's a concept with which I agree completely). I plan to encourage my students and hospice coworkers to read the book (I also highly recommend another book by Bulllis, "Spirituality in Social Work Practice"). The only complaint I have is that this edition (Paperback, 2001) was poorly edited -- too many typos and phrasings that should have been caught by an editor prior to publication. This makes for uneven reading in many spots, but still doesn't obscure the value of the content.

The content of this handbook is incredibly valuable for anyone in spiritual or complementary counseling. There is some redundancy, but the lessons to be learned bear repeating. My complaint, however, is that the book is LOADED with typos, missing words, poor sentence construction, and other grammatical problems. This book definitely needs a revised edition as I felt that the poor writing detracted quite a bit from the material, even rendering some portions unintelligable.