Focusing on the complexities of grief, Gene Fowler offers a fresh perspective on pastoral care for the bereaved, emphasizing the importance of lament in both biblical and contemporary contexts. He challenges traditional grief models, advocating for a more nuanced understanding that respects individual experiences within congregational settings. Through the integration of psychotherapeutic insights and theological reflections, Fowler equips caregivers with practical tools and compassionate approaches, illustrated by various cultural references, to support those navigating profound loss.
Focusing on the funeral process, this guidebook equips pastors with insights and practical advice from the initial call to post-funeral support. It emphasizes the importance of pastoral care during mourning, highlighting how funerals serve as crucial moments for churches to support grieving families. By addressing both the procedural and emotional aspects of funerals, it provides a comprehensive resource for pastors to effectively minister to the bereaved.
(From dust jacket material, hardcover, Viking Press, 1944)Words alone can scarcely reproduce the unparalleled range between Barrymore's achievement and acclaim and his humiliation and self-torture. Such flights of wild and reckless passion, such scenes of heroic debauchery, such moments of matchless artistic triumph should be played behind the lights, in rich costume, and to the accompaniment of the full orchestra. Barrymore's life was neither comedy or tragedy; it was a grand opera.But as perfectly as words can do it, Gene Fowler has told the story. Barrymore was his friend, and his book is warm with the affection that flowed between them. The author respects Barrymore too much, however to apologize for him; he admires Barrymore's talents too much to pretend that those talents were not often thrown away. Fowler does not employ sensation for its own sake or dwell on disaster for its morbid interest; but neither does he insult Barrymore by making him respectable. His subject was a great man, and while that does not necessarily mean that he was a sensible one, it does mean that in the hands of a writer as Fowler he becomes the hero of a moving and engrossing human history.There is a great deal of humor in Good Night, Sweet Prince, for Barrymore was a wit and he consorted with his peers. There is a satisfying amount of the theatre in it, for it spans the period from the great figures of John Drew and Maurice Barrymore to the golden streets of Hollywood in its most spectacular era. There are moments of intense excitement in these pages - the opening night of Hamlet being perhaps the greatest dramatic climax; there are happy and idyllic passages, and there are the others when happiness was destroyed forever as Barrymore brought the roof of his fame crashing down on his head.In addition to his own knowledge of Barrymore, Fowler has had access to his papers. He as read the actor's journal, and he publishes here for the first time long passages from this private autobiography.
