Test

[Philip Brownell]

[Dan Bloom]

got it
On Jul 18, 2010, at 12:44 PM, Philip Brownell wrote:

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[Philip Brownell]

Hello,

I will introduce myself, even though I'm known to most of us.  For the record I'll describe myself and my interest in Edith Stein.

I am a gestalt therapist, and I am active in writing, presenting, organizational work, and pretty much anything that strikes me to be interesting.  I am a former pastor; I was trained in a Conservative Baptist seminary in the last three years of the 1970s, and I spent 13 years in active, full-time ministry.  I was a minister of children in a large, multi-staffed church in central California.  We had about 2500 people in the church, with a staff of about ten.  I oversaw a pre-adolescent program of Christian Education, including staffing nursery and pre-school.  One of my creations during that period was a storytelling festival, and another was a special ministry to the disabled.  I also pastored two, small rural churches (one in Southern Monterey County, California, and the other along the northern Oregon coast.  That's where my first wife left the family, I became a single parent, moved into the city of Portland, worked for three years at minimum wage in a print shop and did several years of therapy.  I went back to school, enrolling in the doctoral program for clinical psychology at George Fox University, and I also started what would become six years of collateral training in gestalt therapy.  The internet happened.  My kids grew up, and to make a long story a bit shorter, I moved to Bermuda, where I've been practicing a mix of psychotherapy, organizational consulting, and coaching.  While in Bermuda my work as a writer has blossomed.  I write a weekly column in The Royal Gazette, Bermuda's largest daily Newspaper, and a member of the Times family of newspapers. I have edited one book on gestalt therapy and research, authored another on gestalt therapy, and I am at work on a second authored book, this one on addictions.  I have several possible books ahead, having discussed them with various publishers with whom I have now worked.

I am interested in Edith Stein because her life intrigues me.  She was a Jew, and then she was an atheist.  She was a philosopher, and then she was a nun. I want to glimpse her journey of faith.  I also want to see her mind at work grappling from a phenomenological perspective, with the things of God.  Much of my current work is in the integration of Christianity and gestalt therapy, which is largely based in Continental philosophy and German science.  Edith Stein fits right in there as this mix of thought and influences were coming together. I hope to be inspired by reading about her life, and I hope to gain insight into how she integrated what she knew of God and what she knew of philosophy.

Who are you, and why are you interested in being here?

Warm Regards,

Phil