Emotions

Emotions is a critically important book to interdisciplinary scholarship in theology. Barbara McClure has given us a historiography of the study of emotions that traces the development of theological, ethical, philosophic, psychological, and scientific understandings of what emotions are and why they matter. The book is erudite, beautifully written, lucid, and engaging. Pastoral and practical theologians, in particular, will relish this resource that promotes clear thinking about emotions and interprets the import of recent discoveries in neuroscience.

~Mary Clark Moschella, Roger J. Squire Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling, Yale University School of Divinity

Emotions is an exceptional treatment of a subject dear to our hearts that has, until now, been studied mainly in disciplinary silos. With scholarly precision and emotional savvy, McClure navigates the vast divides over emotion’s life-giving and death-dealing capacity and renders an amazingly cogent perspective, distilling the best of prominent models and showing how such emotional understanding plays an indispensable role in our pursuit of the good life."

~Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture, The Divinity School and Graduate Department of Religion, Vanderbilt University

Barbara McClure’s ambitious and important book cogently examines and portrays the diverse perspectives regarding emotions and their significance for human flourishing. Scholars, teachers, students, and those in the helping professions interested in the role of emotions will want to read this book.

~Ryan LaMothe, Professor of Pastoral Care and Counseling, Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology

This book is exemplary in the way it sets out the challenges and potential of interdisciplinary study within pastoral and practical theology. McClure talks about each disciplinary paradigm as representing different pieces of a puzzle (p. xii) and accordingly her work is underpinned by an exhaustive body of literature. The bibliography is vast and the footnotes run to over 100 pages: a tour de force of scholarship and a research resource in its own right. Such total immersion in a specialist subject is a rare luxury in contemporary scholarship, but McClure’s work serves as a benchmark for all those who believe that theology’s engagement with human affairs must be attentive to the voices of the world as well as the Church.

~Elaine L. Graham, International Journal of Practical Theology