Carroll E. Arkema

Carroll E. Arkema is an ordained Presbyterian Minister licensed as a Marriage and Family Therapist in New Jersey, and as a Psychoanalyst in New York. Since 2009, he has also been writing poetry.

He majored in English and minored in Religion at Calvin University, Grand Rapids, Michigan; and graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1974 with a major in Christian Education.

He was ordained by the Presbytery of Newark in 1976. He served as an Associate Pastor at Old First Church, Newark, New Jersey, from 1976 till 1981. While there, he went to the Blanton-Peale Graduate Institute in Manhattan to learn to be a Pastoral Psychotherapist and graduated from there in 1983. He was then on the Faculty at Blanton-Peale in the Residency Training Program and as Director of the Spirituality and Psychotherapy Training Program till 1999, while also doing psychotherapy in Manhattan and New Jersey.

His first publication was the paper “A Response to Ann Ulanov’s ‘Depth Psychology and the Transcendent,’” which was published in the Union Seminary Quarterly Review, Vol. 51, No. 3-4, pp. 115-126, 1997.

His poems “Panic,” "Desperately Seeking Mother," “Twelve-Year-Old Face, Holy Heart,” and “God Stammers with Longing, Then Shows Sacrificial Love” were published in the Journal of Religion and Health, and three of them were included in his first book, entitled "Beyond Me: Poems about Spirit in Scripture, Psychotherapy, and Life," published by Resource Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers, in 2013. He has had three more books published by Wipf and Stock: "Poems of Mourning and Healing Memory," 2017, "Drawn to the Light: Poems and Essays," 2019, and "Poetry Zooms In: On the Sacred in Persons and World." 2022.

His email address is arkemac@verizon.net, and his website is www.serviceforcounseling.com.