I would like to thank Kathy Green, Kristin Levine, Mike Roselli, and Matthew Mitola for reading this manuscript and helping shape it.
I would like to thank Suzanne Staszak-Silva for her extraordinary sensitivity as my editor and publisher and Elaine McGarraugh at Rowman and Littlefield.
I would like to thank Scott Widmeyer for his encouragement and support.
I would like to thank Jane Morgan, my mentor at national headquarters of the American Red Cross, the late Susan Hamilton and Marcia Kovach, and so many colleagues throughout the years there.
I would like to thank Tim Serban and the entire Red Cross spiritual care task force for their leadership, dedication, and sacrifices that have made spiritual care as a function of disaster response for the American Red Cross.
I would like to thank my family, particularly my husband, Douglas Ward, for his time and patience during this entire book process. I’d also like to thank Steve and Emily Ward and Andy Ward for your good advice at early stages of this manuscript. I would like to thank Paul Raushenbush, former religion editor of The Huffington Post.
I am profoundly grateful for my parents, Ruth Virginia Basye Johnson and Earl Edward Johnson, for their love and nurture, though they are deceased.