This new guidebook by leading pastoral theologians challenges much in contemporary developmental theory. Arguing that women's developmental stages cannot automatically be assumed to match those of men, the authors provide a fresh analysis of the rewards and challenges of women at different stages of the life cycle.
Useful as a text or reference, the book sheds new light on developmental themes, passages, and issues in the lives of women from the perspective of pastoral care. From pre-adolescence to end-of-life-passages, from such diverse themes as the developmental context for intimate violence and the impact of trauma on development to issues of women's power and authority across the life-span, In Her Own Time provides a much-needed framework for the pastoral care of women. Designed to be used as either a textbook for students or a reference for pastors and counselors, In Her Own Time takes a probing theological and psychological look at the possibilities and hurdles in the life-span of today's women.
Like Gail Sheehy's Passages, Daniel Levinson's Seasons of a Lifetime, or Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, In Her Own Time will provide a frameworkin this case, a religious and theological frameworkfor seeing the specific issues in the lives of today's women.
Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner is professor of pastoral care and pastoral theology at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University; an ordained Presbyterian minister (PCUSA); a psychotherapist in ACPE; a member of the International Academy of Practical Theology; a Henry Luce III Fellow; a McCord Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry; and a former president of the Society for Pastoral Theology. She coedited a volume that transformed the field of pastoral theology, Women in Travail and Transition: A New Pastoral Care (Fortress Press, 1990). Three additional pioneering volumes followed, all with Fortress Press.