Religion and Aging

Find solace and wise counsel in these classics of spiritual gerontology!

In these days, when so many people live beyond the Biblical threescore and ten, the spiritual questing and questioning of the aged demands a meaningful response from clergy, family members, and nursing home staff. The essays and research studies reprinted in Religion and Aging: An Anthology of the Poppele Papers investigate the role of faith in older people's lives. Many of these classic studies have been updated with new information.

These essays were originally published in the Quarterly Papers on Religion and Aging. This renowned journal was issued from 1984 to 1994 by the Poppele Center for Health and Welfare Studies at the Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri. The issues of spiritual gerontology discussed in that journal are still powerfully relevant today. Because back issues of the journal are not widely available, the cream of its ten-year history is being reissued in permanent form.

Religion and Aging offers unfailing wisdom and insight in a broad range of issues, including:

• training clergy to be more responsive to the needs of older people a historical perspective on the meaning of ”honoring thy father and mother” in first-century Judaism and Christianity
• the Psalms as a way to help nursing home residents deal with pain, loneliness, anger, and other difficult emotions
• original research into belief patterns of older Americans
• ways to give meaning to suffering suggested by the lives and works of Viktor Frankl, Martin Gray, and Rabbi Harold Kushner
• techniques of communicating with older people
  
  Religion and Aging is an invaluable resource to anyone who works with old people, whether in adult day-care programs, nursing homes, hospitals, or other senior citizens’groups. It will help chaplains, pastors, rabbis, and other clergy minister more effectively to the older members of their flock.