www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9eaC-2quwA

   I'd be really interested to hear other people's experience with nouthetics, either positive or negative. My experience was very close to being the defining moment of my life (in a negative sense), and forever colored my view of evangelicals and mental illness. What was your experience, people?

Dear Darrel,
   No pressure. I hope you feel better. ER sounds nasty. By the way, I love your essay comparing b. counselors to MIT professors. Very apt.

I fully intended to read it over the break but instead I got a trip to the ER with a tooth abscess.

I'll pick it back up once I'm off the pain meds.

I worked a lot on the memoir over break and have it almost half done now. I love this forum, I wish it was getting more attention. But it's young still, so there's hope.

The lack of peer reviewed data in nouthetic testimonials is one of the biggest drawbacks of the theory, in my opinion. Neither nouthetics nor deliverance supporters have ever allowed their methodologies to be put under sustained scientific scrutiny. If faith reallly "manages" then one would think it would manage in an empirically-verifiable manner.

The problem here is that very little of what is done is actual 'science.' Can you imagine what a medical textbook written this way would look like?

Not just a medical textbook, but any textbook or journal article in any discipline, be it in the hard sciences, soft sciences, humanities, theology, or whatever. I'm hardly in the anti-nouthetic camp myself, but the absence of adherence to standard scholarly protocol is definitely something to consider.

in one of our textbooks, nearly all of the sources cited were secondary, not primary, and definitely not peer-reviewed.

The problem here is that very little of what is done is actual 'science.' Can you imagine what a medical textbook written this way would look like?

Interesting. Your description of the RTS class sounds very much like the nouthetic counseling classes I took in Bible college. One thing that sticks out to me was a comment that one of my classmates made in one of those classes: in one of our textbooks, nearly all of the sources cited were secondary, not primary, and definitely not peer-reviewed.

  Hey guys, I'm working on my memoir concerning my experiences with biblical counseling. I've gotten some great advice from some people, but if you know anyone who'd be interested in reading it, let me know (it's about 90 single spaced, typed pages in the first draft.). I'm currently working on the second draft. My e-mail, in case anyone is interested, is:

john_weaver8@hotmail.com