Spiritual Care and Counseling
Spiritual Care and Counseling
As a writer, I have written a number of articles: "Spiritual Awareness and the Interdisciplinary Team", "Chaplain: Point Person for Interdisciplinary Team Development", "Embracing the Elderly Patients' Wish to Die", "Executive Directors: What They Look for in a Hospice Chaplain Candidate", "Power Patterns within Professional Relationships," and "Reaching the Latin American Population: What Hospice Should Know." My latest article, "Intimacy, Love, and Death" (Voices, Summer, 2011), is a personal account on a less than smooth ride in integrating/befriending death into my own life.
Currently, I am also a contributing author to Open to Hope Foundation, having written the following: "God Doesn't 'Zap' Those who Express Emotion;" "Military Families: The Shock of "Killed in Action;" "People Don't Understand: A Universal Cry;" and "Turning Over a New Faith." To view these articles, click here.
See what others are saying about Spiritual Care to Elderly and Dying Loved OnesSpiritual Care to Elderly and Dying Loved Ones is a wonderful book for spiritual counselors, chaplains, and clergy. Kevin Quiles carefully blends solid theory, thoughtful insights, skilled practice, and sensitively-drawn cases into a most useful and practical resource.
Kenneth J. Doka, PhD
Senior Consultant, The Hospice Foundation of America
One of the lessons in spiritual literature I appreciate most is, “Do nothing and achieve much.” Doing nothing is a mysterious activity/inactivity that takes a while to master. Kevin Quiles has mastered it. He knows that you have to be experienced, skilled, and informed to treat people in distress with just the right degree of intervention and assistance. This is a strong and yet delicate book for healthcare workers that could transform the way they deal with people and families.
Thomas Moore
Author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller Care of the Soul
Spiritual Care to Elderly and Dying Loved Ones by author Kevin Quiles, M.Div. is an important, beautifully written, much needed companion for anyone traveling the difficult road of care-giving and care-receiving. As someone who knows what it is to watch an older loved one succumb to a devastating illness, as my family experienced with the death of my grandmother -- who wanted not only the support of those who loved her but a connection to her faltering faith -- I can only regret that this enlightened, practical, and loving book had not been written at that time. Combining the hopeful compassion of Harold Kushner's Who Needs God? and the storytelling mastery of Mitch Albom (Tuesdays with Morrie), Spiritual Care to Elderly and Dying Loved Ones broaches two of the most difficult subjects in human discourse -- religion and death -- yet does so in a way that is accepting of all points of view. Not everyone is as fortunate as those caregivers we meet on these pages to have the personal guidance of Kevin Quiles at their side. But now, with this book that is clearly written from the soul, readers will be heartened in navigating their toughest challenges in their time of need.
Mim Eichler Rivas
Author of Beautiful Jim Key: The Lost History of the World's Smartest Horse, co-author of Pursuit of Happyness with Chris Gardner, and Finding Fish with Antwone Fisher
Mortality is an implacable beast, always present yet always difficult to look in the eye. In Spiritual Care to Elderly and Dying Loved Ones, Kevin Quiles invites us to look at it directly and to face it with human compassion and courage. Differentiating the dogmatic answers from the spiritual mystery, he immediately points to the person of the caregiver, asking us to look inward to our own difficulties and agendas. Correctly, he points out that we must first attend to ourselves: so often our own personhood, our empathy and clarity and willingness to be present with fear, suffering, and the unknown, is all we have to give. But “all we have to give” is, as he illustrates through many examples, a great deal indeed. Quiles invites us to accept the difficulty and the struggle, forgoing formulaic answers, responding instead with the courage, endurance and love required to be fully present with the dying and their families. The task at hand occurs in the relationships we are willing to enter with these people. Only in these relationships can we seek out meaning in the face of tragedy and death; only in compassionate joining is there reassurance that our personal suffering is not the whole of reality. This book, written with honesty and caring, experience and thoughtfulness, will be indispensible to those who must deal with dying and death. That is to say, to every one of us. At the same time as it is accessible to the general public, it should be required reading for therapists, counselors, pastors, and everyone in the medical and nursing professions.
Stephen Howard, MD
Author of The Heart and Soul of the Therapist Psychiatrist and Instructor in Continuing Education
For speaking engagements and booksigning events, please call me at 770-417-2737.
Spiritual Care and Counseling
