A national survey of counselor education programs indicated that a minority of programs include religious and spiritual issues. Survey respondents, however, who are predominantly program heads, generally consider these issues important in counseling.

A national sample (n = 479) of counselors representative of the 1993 American Counseling Association membership was surveyed regarding their value orientations in four domains: universal values, mental health values, individualistic‐collectivistic values, and religious‐spiritual values. Results yielded a multifaceted, generally concordant (although by no means unanimous) value profile for professional counselors across these value domains, presenting an overall content pattern that might be globally summarized as a strong core valuing of holistic‐humanistic empowerment related to personal development and interpersonal and social concern. Implications for counseling practice, limitations, and suggestions for future research are discussed.

The authors surveyed the universal and mental health values of 121 Muslims in the United States and their counseling preferences. The respondents were generally well educated and highly religious. They responded high in the universal values of benevolence and conformity; low in power, hedonism, and stimulation; and high in many humanistic mental health values. A comparison with typical counselor values showed both similarities and differences. A substantial minority indicated a willingness to go to a non‐Muslim counselor but most would want a counselor with an understanding of Islam. Implications for counseling practice and future research are discussed.

Relationship-centered counseling is a development in the client-centered tradition. It represents a humanistic integration that gives primacy to the humanizing and counseling relationship, conceives technical expertise as the instrumental extension of relationship, and affirms the necessity for an in-depth synthesis of both for effective counseling. Significant findings from contemporary process and outcome research are presented as supportively consistent with the relationship-centered integration, which has implications for research, practice, and training. A significant trend in counseling is toward integration in theory and eclecticism in practice Wachtel, 1991). Although integrative and eclectic efforts are not new (Arkowitz, 1992), increasing emphasis on bridging the multiple dimensions of human development and behavior (e.g., biological, psychological, and cultural) and efforts to combine strengths from singletheory approaches have given further impetus to this trend.I have described elsewhere a humanistically based integration termed relationship-centered counseling (Kelly, 1994). This integrative approach is formulated as a higher order conceptualization that systematically combines and unifies the humanistic and technical components of counseling within a comprehensive empirical and meta-empirical perspective. The purpose of this article is to present an updated summary of the basic propositions of a relationship-centered approach, to place the approach in the larger context of current counseling research, and to suggest implications and recommendations for theory, research, and practice. The article is organized in four parts: (a) background and statement of the problem; (b) basic theoretical principles; (c) research supportively consistent with a relationship-centered integration; and (d) applications of a relationship-centered approach.

Accreditation standards for counselor preparation have the potential for bringingappropriate consideration of religious and spiritualissues into the training of counselors. This article extends Pate and High's (1995) Pate and High's (1995) study of 60 CACREP-accredited counselor training programs suggested that accreditation standards may have the potential for influencing counselor training programs to include a consideration of religion in counselor education. CACREP standards explicitly include religious preference as a social and cultural factor that students are to study for understanding the diversity of client attitudes and behaviors (Council for the Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs [CACREP], 1994). The good news of Pate and High's study is that a majority (60%) of responding CACREP programs include a consideration of religious beliefs and practices in their foundational studies, another 53% do so in other parts of the curriculum (it is not clear how much overlap there is in the two percentages), and fully 84% of responding counselor educators rated counselors' awareness of clients' religious beliefs as at least of some importance.The bad news in the Pate and High study is that despite the explicit accreditation standard regarding religion, a substantial minority of CACREPaccredited programs do not include client religious issues as part of their curriculum, and at least a handful (about 15%) of CACREP-based counselor educators do not think it is important to do so. This is bad news not only because it suggests some neglect of accreditation standards, but more im-