SoulMates.

Thomas Moore Thomas Moore is the author of Care of the Soul (HarperCollins, 1992) and SoulMates (HarperCollins, 1994). Moore combines spiritual guidance with an exploration of myth and tradition. Before becoming a therapist, Moore lived in a Catholic religious order for twelve years. He left shortly before ordination, but still regards his work as priestly. He frequently uses stories from the Christian Scriptures to make his points, though he as often draws upon Greek mythology, Romantic poetry, and Renaissance psychology. His main source of inspiration, however, is Carl Jung.

Moore's style is a cross between M. Scott Peck and the late Joseph Campbell. He mixes psychological vignettes with the fascination of relating myths to our life-journeys. He manifests the Jungian brilliance of maintaining a creative tension among the various elements of the psyche. This is the core of his spirituality. Moore is never one to advise shrinking from one's shadow. Problems become unopened doors; dilemmas become new horizons; terrors are transformed into opportunities for growth.

Moore's positions, however, are not without their own eccentricities. Following the Renaissance hermetic philosophers, Paracelsus and Ficino, Moore proposes an animistic vision of the universe, one in which all of creation is experienced as being alive. This view goes hand in hand with Moore's assertion that a scientific perspective is just another mythology. Surely rationalistic and reductionistic world views need to be challenged, but Moore's Romantic concepts avoid rather than come to grips with scientific viewpoints.

Though Moore encourages people to be guided by ritual and formal religion and to grant "special status and honor" to the dogmas of their own religions, he himself seems to speak from a privileged place above and beyond any particular religion. When he does reflect on the stories of Christianity, he uses them as individualized pieces cut off from the whole. He mines the baptism of Jesus or the parable of the laborers for whatever psychological nuggets he might uncover, but never acknowledges that these take on their fullest meaning only within the larger context of who Jesus is and what the Christian faith is all about. To augment Moore, I recommend John Dunne's The Way of All the Earth (Macmillan, 1972), which models "passing over" into another tradition and then "coming back" into one's own, while respecting the integrity of each.

John Bradshaw Like Moore, John Bradshaw lived within a Catholic religious order for close to a decade and dropped out shortly before ordination. Bradshaw's seminary days were characterized by alcoholic drinking. He became famous through his PBS series, Bradshaw On: The Family, in which he combined the explosive energy of recovery from alcoholism with useful tools for analyzing family dynamics. Bradshaw is a compelling speaker who exhibits a no-holds-barred honesty as he gets in touch with his rage. He is one of the main popularizers of the term "dysfunctional family."