Abstract
This essay focuses on Donald Capps’s proposal of juxtaposition as a method of pastoral theological reflection and the lessons that the author has learned from borrowing Capps’s method both as a scholar and a teacher. Resistance to psychological insights or theory is something that the author frequently encounters in teaching pastoral care courses. The use of juxtaposition, as Capps first presented it, has provided her with resources for overcoming resistance in ways that invite creativity and openness to learning by beginning with or improvising with metaphors, musical elements, or stories and movies focused on everyday life that are frequently more familiar to students than psychological theory. In this essay, the author juxtaposes the significance of story as employed by Donald Capps and Oliver Sacks in a “creative conversation” that is more realistically about the “powers of three.”
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Schweitzer, C.L.S. Juxtaposition or “the Powers of Two”: A Tribute to Donald Capps in Conversation with Oliver Sacks. Pastoral Psychol 65, 835–848 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-016-0736-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-016-0736-y