BIO ~ Gordon J Hilsman
Author of Five Books
Gordon J Hilsman was born and raised in the U.S. state of Iowa and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1967.
He resigned from the priesthood in 1977, has been married to Nancy for 45 years and has three grown children.
He has a B.S. Degree in Chemistry, master’s degrees in human development and theology, and a doctorate in Pastoral Counseling.
He is the author of five nonfiction books, three in his field of clinical education, one on Intimate Spirituality, and this one on character in top politicians. Fascinated by the concepts of virtue all his life, through Catholic school, college, and theology school, he first published Intimate Spirituality: The Catholic Way of Love and Sex (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) using virtues as traits people need to develop as they negotiate intimate relationships, for success in love and growth as human beings.
He published Spiritual Care in Common Terms: How Chaplains Can Effectively Record the Spiritual Needs of Patients in the Medical Record (Jessica Kingsley Publications, 2016) from the conviction that spiritual caregivers need to communicate succinctly for physicians to quickly grasp the personal and interpersonal struggles patients are having that may impede or exacerbate their medical condition and recovery.
The next year he published How to Get the Most out of Clinical Pastoral Education: a CPE Primer (Kingsley, 2017), as the first book that describes the essentials of the standard clinical education for spiritual caregiving in health care and psychiatric facilities. In 2022 he published Confrontation in Spiritual Care: An Anthology for Spiritual Caregivers, (KDP, 2024) to augment the standard core of conveyed empathy in spiritual care with the frequent need to confront patients and others to be congruent and authentic in caregiving.
Recently Hilsman has published on the writer’s platform, Substack, over 25 weekly essays on the subject of assessing the character of candidates for political office, the theme of his current book.
His current book:
Assessing the Character of Candidates for National Political Office: In Search of a Collaborative Spirit, (KDP 2024) makes the case that the character of top politicians has such great influence on their functioning in governance that voters need to take seriously the specifics of their character before electing them. James Madison, the writer of the U.S. constitution believed that the first act of a constitution is to find people for leaders who have the wisdom to discern the common good and virtue to pursue it while in office.
The campaign and election processes of the U. s. and other democratic republics have mostly eliminated any practice that would follow that wise advice of some of our for-fathers.
Chapter two of this book briefly describes the evolution of the concept of virtue over the past three millennia, by promoting the thinking and writing of twenty great historical figures such as Hammurabi, Confucius, Plato, Moses and on to Benjamin Franklin on the subject of virtue.
The book then proceeds to describe twenty traits and their relevance to evaluating top politicians as necessary in some measure for fitness to serve the government and promote the evolutionary wellbeing and progress of the people. It suggests that to pursue the evaluation of political candidates there will be necessary changes to be made, to include a small group encounter process and more challenging town hall type venues to assess character before candidacy, in every U.S. state.
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