This course offers an experiential, clinical, theological, and pastoral approach to the management, resolution, transformation, and utilization of conflict in both personal and pastoral perspectives. As an interdisciplinary approach it will draw on communication theory, therapeutic process, conflict studies, and mediation skills. The capacity to go beyond survival of conflict to both transform it and utilize it in creative growth is essential in ministry as a pastoral counselor, caregiver, mediator, educator, or administrator. All class participants will develop in cognitive grasp of conflict theory, affective growth in comfort with and appreciation of conflict dynamics and skill development in coping, recreating, and redirecting tensions in constructive conciliation. An integration of lecture, dialogue, experiential exercise, sociodrama, small groups, simulations, and class discussion of cases, theory, and theology will allow opportunity for personal as well as professional growth experiences to be processed and integrated into pastoral identity.
Class meets once each week for four hours.
Conflict Mediation Across Cultures . Helping People to Forgive . Fisher, Roger and Ury, William. Getting to Yes . Houghton Mifflin, 1981.