Ray McKinnis

I appreciate the comments responding to my first blog on this topic and am encouraged to develop these ideas further. The first blog was about distinguishing religion from spirituality. This second blog focuses on the term ‘for Counselors.’ A (possibly apocryphal) story makes a couple of critical points: An American Indian tribe used to worship the Corn God as that Power Beyond all Powers who gave them bountiful corn crops every year on land where other tribes could not survive. Every year, while planting their corn, they would sacrifice a fish to the Corn God in every hill of corn. Every year their crops were plentiful.

I appreciate the ACA giving me this opportunity to have a dialogue with other counselors on a topic that is important to me and to other counselors and is attracting more and more interest: spirituality and religion. On the one hand, spirituality and religion (SR) are among the most powerful forces in human history and in contemporary human life throughout the world. Gone are the days when they can be ignored or explained away by psychological reductionism.