Clinical Pastoral Education
Formation through supervised practice
Everything you need to know about CPE at Anam Cara — before you apply.
Our Areas of Expertise
Expertise born from a diversely trained faculty
The depth of Anam Cara CPE doesn't come from a curriculum alone — it comes from the people who teach it. Our supervisor-educators have been formed across military units, correctional facilities, hospice rooms, hospital wards, intercultural ministries, and parish pulpits. Each brings a lived context into the peer group, so the care you offer in your setting is met by someone who has served there too. Whatever setting you're entering, you learn alongside faculty who speak its language.
Military Spiritual Formation (SMSF)
Military & Veteran Care
Trusted by over 1,000 military chaplains and spiritual care professionals across all service branches. Our faculty includes supervisor-educators with active and veteran military chaplaincy experience, so the training speaks to deployment rotations, operational trauma, moral injury, and the spiritual demands of active duty, reserve, and veteran care.
Correctional Chaplaincy
Prisons & Institutional Care
Correctional chaplaincy is its own world — concrete walls, razor wire, deep trauma, and intense spiritual hunger in every cellblock. Our faculty has lived it. You won't have to explain your environment; you'll be supervised by chaplains who know the difference between theory and survival inside the system, with trauma-informed care protocols adapted for high-security facilities.
Intercultural Chaplaincy
Global & Diaspora Ministry
Created for internationally born spiritual caregivers, immigrant ministry leaders, and diaspora pastors stepping into Western healthcare, hospice, military, and institutional care systems. Faculty who have crossed those same boundaries help you bridge communication styles, documentation expectations, and team dynamics while honoring your authentic theological roots.
Hospice & End-of-Life Care
Palliative & Bereavement Care
End-of-life ministry requires a gentle, non-anxious presence capable of holding grief, facilitating difficult family conversations, and offering comfort during active dying and bereavement. Our faculty brings deep hospice experience in anticipatory grief, existential pain, and family systems — and the self-care and boundary practices that keep a caregiver whole near mortality.
Clinical Healthcare Chaplaincy
Hospitals & Health Systems
Prepare for emergency department trauma, ICU bedside rounds, pediatric support, and staff emotional care in regional hospitals, trauma centers, and community health systems. Faculty grounded in acute medical settings teach verbatim analysis, chart-ready documentation, and pluralistic, trauma-informed care across every faith tradition and non-religious worldview.
CPE for Parish Ministers
Congregational & Parish Ministry
CPE isn't only for institutional chaplains. Parish ministers, pastors, and lay leaders bring the same action-reflection practice into the life of a congregation — visiting the sick, accompanying the grieving, sitting with crisis. Our faculty includes those formed in parish ministry, helping you let the work of pastoral care form you alongside the preaching, teaching, and shepherding you already do.
One program. A faculty that meets you where you serve.
You don't apply for a separate track — you bring your context into a single CPE unit, and our diversely trained faculty shapes the reflection around it. Tell us where you serve, and we'll help you set up an approved clinical site and match you with a cohort that understands it.