A decade of research on religion and counseling, consisting of 148 empirical articles, was reviewed. Methodological sophistication, poor a decade ago, has approached current secular standards, except in outcome research. Religious people cannot be assumed to be mentally unhealthy. Nonreligious and religious counselors share most counseling-relevant values but differ in the value they place on religion. Those religious differences affect clinical judgment and behavior, especially with religious clients. Religious interventions have been techniques imported from formal religious traditions and used as adjuncts to counseling or traditional theories of counseling adapted to religious clients. The authors suggest a research agenda and speculate about future mental health practices.

Numerous accounts of research on promoting forgiveness in group settings have been published, indicating that forgiveness can be promoted successfully in varying degrees. Many have suggested that empathy-based interventions are often successful. It takes time to develop empathy for an offender. We report three studies of very brief attempts to promote forgiveness in psychoeducational group settings. The studies use ten-minute, one-hour, two-hour, and 130–minute interventions with college students. The studies test whether various components–-namely, pre-intervention videotapes and a letter-writing exercise–-of a more complex model (the Pyramid Model to REACH Forgiveness) can produce forgiveness. Each study is reported on its own merits, but the main lesson is that the amount of forgiveness is related to time that participants spend empathizing with the transgressor. A brief intervention of two hours or less will probably not reliably promote much forgiveness; however, one might argue that it starts people on the road to forgiving.

Strategic hope-focused relationship enrichment is a brief, eclectic, research-based program to enhance couples' relationships. Couples (N = 51; 16 married, 24 cohabiting, 11 engaged) completed 5 sessions of enrichment counseling (n -26) or 3 written assessments (n = 25) from 1 of 12 counselors. Couples receiving enrichment counseling had higher relationship satisfaction and quality-of-couple skills at posttest and at the 3-week follow-up than did written-assessment-only (control) couples. Conditions did not differ in terms of quality of overall attraction or 2 measures of commitment. We concluded that relationship enrichment using this program was effective, powerful, and cost-effective. Future research should focus on testing the effectiveness of the program presented in a group format.

Snyder and Rice (1994) comment that Shortz, Worthington, McCullough, DeVries, andMorrow (1994) failed to use sophisticated methods in their identijlcation of prolific authors, institutions, andjournals within the field of mari-tal therapy. This article is a response to Snyder and Rice. We argue that Snyder and Rice's suggested methods emphasize a diferent research question than our original question. We investigatedproductivity of authors and institutions, not im-pact of scholars on the field of marital therapy. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the results obtained from Snyder and Rice's suggested methodologies are not appreciably diferentfrom our original results.Snyder andRice (1994) argue that the methodused by Shortz, Worthington, McCullough, DeVries, and Morrow (1994) to identify prolific authors, institutions, and publication outlets in the field of marital therapy "suggests serious limitations to their conclusions" (p. 191).Snyder and Rice (1994) offer other "sophisticated methodologies . . . for identifying those sources bearing the greatest influence on a discipline" (p. 195). They offer helpful suggestions to identify influential sources within a field, and we commend them for their suggestions. CloseNext Results from the three questions indicated that the 5 journals that were considered to be the most prominent in marital therapy, and the journals to which researchers most often submitted their work in marital therapy were

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