This paper explores dialectical relationships between affective mental disturbance and religious development in men. It then proposes a form of pastoral engagementthe mutual encounter-with men so afflicted. In care giving, the pastor may draw on his or her own charismatic endowment to solicit the recognition of the same within the care seeker, all the while respecting a man's attenuating psychosocial need for communicative boundaries and privacy. Both pastor and care seeker may engage the care process as a mutual, continuing, and dialogic quest for authentic Christian relationship, charisma, and selfhood where each serves as "guide" and "messenger."
This paper introduces a kenotic theory of conversion that builds from simple attachment to childhood experience of peak states to encompass dialectical stages of development: Priming, Decentering, Reflection, Encounter, Denucleation, Emplacement and Discipline. Thereafter, the dialectical mode gives rise to the mature phase of conversion-the continuing integration of the religious worldview through Metamorphosis and Embassy. The conversion theory is illustrated by an interpretation of a dialectical set of experiences of Anton Boisen. I interpret Anton Boisen's conversion from a 19th Century Christianity that was wedded to religious and racial manifest destiny to that of a reborn Christian living with the 20th Century's experience of evangelical and evolutionary universalism. Boisen's clinical desolations ("psychosis") and adoption of vocation ("change of allegiance") suggest his conversion counterposed the instinctual with the higher order ideals he struggled to embody-a dialectical negation of his younger static and triumphalist Christian cultural identity that developed into a more integrated, expansive, and inclusive view of the human family and deepening allegiance to the ordinary, underserved, and growing population of the mentally suffering.
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