News
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Asian American Pacific Islander Community of Practice UpdateJun 2, 2022
Violence against Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPI) spiked when the pandemic began with nearly 11,000 hate incidents against Asian Americans recorded from March 2020 to December 2021[i]. In March 2021, six Asian women were killed in Atlanta. A couple of months later at our ACPE Annual Conference, little acknowledgment of this violence, and the experiences of its AAPI members was made. In June 2021, a few ACPE AAPI Certified Educators formed the AAPI Community of Practice.
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Listening and Reflecting: Process ImprovementJun 2, 2022
As we wake up to the news of more deaths and violence during these challenging and painful days, I think about you and what you hold. The listening and presence you provide are the sources of healing. Holding tension and mystery is challenging when we carry our own grief.
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TransitionsJun 1, 2022
Transitions are unavoidable. How we navigate those transitions, however, is often within our scope of management.
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For your professional ethics edification in June
May 30, 2022
Once a month the ACPE Professional Ethics Commission (PEC) posts a couple of statements from our Code of Professional Ethics for ACPE Members. Each posting is accompanied by a brief personal reflection from a member of the PEC discussing some ways this person lives these commitments
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A Prayer for UvaldeMay 27, 2022
Lord in your mercy, hear our prayer. Children. Too many children. Your children. All of them. Each one. Lord, sometimes it is too much to bear, And yet we come to you in our grief, in our anger, In our shock, in our weeping, To do that very thing, To ask you to help us bear that which is unbearable.
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Reflection on "The Soul of the Helper"May 25, 2022
Dr. Holly Oxhandler, author of The Soul of the Helper: Seven States to Seeing the Sacred Within Yourself So You Can See It In Others was the second speaker in our Psychotherapy Webinar Series. Her topic was “The Soul of the Helper: Contemplating and Integrating the Intersection between spirituality and mental health.”
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Searching for HopeMay 23, 2022
After the racist mass shooting in Buffalo and shootings in California, Houston, and Chicago, images of violence and grief engulfed my mind. I can only imagine the heightened vulnerability Black, Indigenous, and people of color feel as members of targeted groups. Black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to die from gun violence and 14 times more likely than white Americans to be wounded, as documented by the gun violence prevention group Brady.
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Strange and Stranger FruitMay 20, 2022
Strange fruit may no longer hang from poplar trees Nor do black bodies swing freely in the Southern breeze Yet our blood still flows at the roots Black folks blood Flows in the streets Flows in the church Flows in the aisles Flows in our homes Flows from our black bodies Flows
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Reflection on the Laguna Wood Taiwanese Church Shooting IncidentMay 20, 2022
The Laguna Wood Church shooting incident became a wake-up call for me. Receiving a text from my sister in Taiwan, informing me that my uncle’s church in California was the target of the shooting was shocking to me. There are different kinds of hate crimes; usually, they are racially motivated in the US context. However, this one is different. It is a politically motivated hate crime: A Chinese man decided to kill the Taiwanese because he hated them.
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Executive Director ArticleMay 13, 2022
We have enjoyed what has felt like an exceptionally beautiful spring in this part of the world. The temperatures have been mild, and the rain has come just often enough to make everything burst with life. It feels like the mood of the last two years has begun to lift. As we make our way around town, we see fewer masks, more hugs, and people gathered in restaurants, theaters, stores, and at the airport. We cannot help but be drawn together, especially after many months of separation and physical distancing.
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"Am I Qualified?"May 11, 2022
Ms. Susan Rogers[1] was a devout member of the Tabernacle Church all of her life. She taught Bible Study, led the Women’s Ministry, and was the most gifted baker in the small New England city where she resided for over 80 years. She managed to get by on her deceased husband’s pension, knowing her tithe and support of extended family required a modest lifestyle in the community known for low income, close-knit neighborhoods, and violence related to lack of jobs and limited housing.
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Built to EndureMay 3, 2022
A recent meeting with a supervisee led us to the topic of resilience for the psychotherapist and it occurred to me that I have reframed that for myself spiritually as being “built to endure.” I find myself reflecting on memories of living on a small farm in my youth. Ours was a simple yet hard lifestyle of making “do” with equipment that we had – keeping in mind the usefulness of particularly “dirty” jobs that required getting muddy or covered with dirt.
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For your professional ethics edification in MayApr 28, 2022
Once a month the ACPE Professional Ethics Commission (PEC) posts a couple of statements from our Code of Professional Ethics for ACPE Members. Each posting is accompanied by a brief personal reflection from a member of the PEC discussing some ways this person lives these commitments
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Looking Ahead in 2022
Apr 28, 2022
The 2022 ACPE Annual Conference is presented jointly with the Association of Professional Chaplains. We’ve teamed up to offer “Freedom, Wonder, and Liberation: Anti-Bias Practices of Spiritual Care and Education.” I want to thank the conference planners for putting together a powerful tapestry of offerings. The conference speakers bring psychological and theological theories that give grounding for our deepening work as an anti-bias organization. As I’ve done some pre-conference reading from our speakers’ bodies of work, I realized the planning committee has knit together content that helps stretch us in our learning and more deeply integrate what we’ve known.
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Your Gifts at Work: “Taking CPE to the Streets”Apr 25, 2022
Thanks to the support of our faithful donors, in 2020, the Foundation for ACPE granted $21,000 in Innovative Program Awards to support “Taking CPE to the Streets,” an initiative led by ACPE Certified Educator Danielle Buhuro and Eden Theological Seminary Dean Sonja Williams. This project created an ACPE accredited CPE program in a context where seminarian CPE students could learn in a community – justice-oriented context. In doing so, they engaged the multiple pandemics of COVID-19 and police brutality as well as addressed the systemically biased based oppressions of urban communities made of people of color.
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It’s all connected … an Earth Month meditationApr 21, 2022
In this generation of climate-changing human impact, it can feel hard to know how and where to stand. The scale of change feels too huge and daunting for any one human. Human appetites for water and oil, food and convenience drive many of these challenges, but what difference can one human being make? And how do we keep our fatalism from proving fatal to more and more of us, more and more species, and the planetary home we share?
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Station ElevenApr 18, 2022
The church I attend here in Asheville, Circle of Mercy, meets on Sunday evenings in space shared by a host church, Land of the Sky United Church of Christ. On Good Friday each year, Land of the Sky creates a stations of the cross experience in their sanctuary, and this year, for the first time, I decided to go.
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Side EffectsApr 15, 2022
Rev. Miguel Santamaria is a Certified Educator at Morton Plant Hospital and wrote the poem, "Side Effects"
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This Work Matters
Apr 14, 2022
Have you seen the call for nominations for awards? As with every year, we want to celebrate our colleagues and recognize those who have been leaders in the movements of clinical pastoral education and spiritually integrated psychotherapy. These awards are a way of celebrating all of us, of making our increasing commitment to appreciative inquiry come alive in the stories and practices of colleagues. It is a way of reminding us who we are and why we do what we do.
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The Journey of Professional Spiritual IntegrationApr 11, 2022
About 90% of my clients indicate that they are either religious or spiritual. When I see this self-identification, I usually feel especially hopeful about my work with the person seeking healing. It gives me permission to ask about more than meets the visible eye, more than what the DSMV can capture.