This volume examines a range of new pastoral problems encountered by ministry in a changing and increasingly polarized world of social differences. Eighteen scholars attempt to determine in what way and to what extent current models of care and counseling, as taught for a generation in our seminaries and widely practiced in ministry, are adequate for the pastoral needs of persons experiencing tensions that focus pastorally on issues like abortion, child abuse, and racism, and conflicts between the sexes, generations, economic classes, ethnic groups, races, and religious and moral cultures.