Abstract
In this final chapter, Wimberley draws from the Old Testament narrative to offer a culturally sensitive approach to mental health intervention with black clergy. This approach to care-giving takes into consideration the historical trauma of slavocracy, endemic societal oppression, the cultural stigmatization of depression in the African American community, the internalized/external expectations of black clergy and the preoccupation with image promotion/projection. She utilizes the prophetess Huldah as a constructive metaphor for engaging therapeutic practice with black pastors. The HULDAH model of care-giving is a communal–contextual pastoral theological methodology that provides protective therapeutic “holding spaces” for pastors to experience reincorporation into communal life through relationality, reconciliation, restorative or curative teaching, and renewal.
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Notes
- 1.
Painter, Nell. “Sojourner Truth in Life and Memory: Writing the Biography of an American Exotic.” Gender & History, 1990—Spring; Vol. 2, No 1, 6.
- 2.
The Penguin English Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. “undergird.”
- 3.
- 4.
Genesis 4:9–10.
- 5.
Patton, ibid., 35.
- 6.
William MacDonald, Bible Believer’s Commentary: Old Testament. (Nashville, TN: Thompson Nelson Publishers, 1992), 464. The Old Testament prophetess Huldah is one of four women with an authentic prophetic ministry of mention in the Old Testament (the others being Miriam, Deborah, and Isaiah’s wife). See Ann Spangler and Jean E. Syswerda, Women of the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1999), 248.
- 7.
“The Huldah narrative is exceptional, in that, the roles of women in biblical history have typically been that of childbearer, obedient servant/wife, or as a commodity (or item for exchange in society).” See Preston Kavanagh, Huldah: The Prophet Who Wrote Hebrew Scripture (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012), 233.
- 8.
Mishneh is otherwise known as “the college.”
- 9.
Kavanagh, ibid., 32.
- 10.
Thomas Kelly Cheyne, The Decline and Fall of the Kingdom of Judah. (London, England: A. and C. Black, 1908), 17.
- 11.
Kavanagh, ibid., 3.
- 12.
“She is the only one of Deuteronomy’s leading authors to be significantly encoded in the initial verses of Dtr’s opening chapters – 5, 6, 7, and 8.” Kavanagh, 109.
- 13.
Maureen Walker, How Connections Heal: Stories from Relational-Cultural Therapy (New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 2004), 11.
- 14.
Relationality or relationship authenticity is described as “the ongoing challenge to feel emotionally real, connected, and vital, clear and purposeful in a relationship. It describes the ongoing and mutual need in a relationship to be seen and recognized.” See Judith Jordan, Women’s Growth in Diversity: More Writings from the Stone Center (New York, NY: The Guilford Press, 1997), 245.
- 15.
Patton emphasizes experience as primary in contextual pastoral care. Patton, ibid., 44.
- 16.
“The False Self has as its main concern a search for conditions which will make it possible for the True Self to come to its own. If conditions cannot be found then there must be reorganized a new defense against exploitation of the True Self.” See Val Richards, The Person Who Is Me: Contemporary Perspectives on the True and False Self. (London, England, 1996), 11.
- 17.
Boyd-Franklin, ibid., 231.
- 18.
Thurman, Howard, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1976), 12.
- 19.
Wimberly, Edward, Relational Refugees: Alienation and Reincorporation in African American Churches and Communities (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press), 2000, 20.
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Wimberley, W. (2016). A Pastoral Theological Response to Depression in African American Pastors. In: Depression in African American Clergy. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94910-6_6
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