No One Is Interchangeable: The Image of God and the Dignity of Every Client

Every counselor operates from some picture of what a human being is. Most of the time that picture stays unexamined — until it fails a client. This course takes up a question that three Divine Mercy University faculty pose in conversation: what actually changes in clinical practice when the person across from you is understood as made in the image and likeness of God? Drawing on a faculty panel with Lisa Klewicki, Bill Nordling, and Craig Steven Titus, the course develops four foundational claims — that the person is created good, called to flourishing and meaning, relationally bound to others as brother and sister, and created uniquely and irreplaceably — and shows how each one reshapes the way a clinician sees, assesses, and sits with another human being. The heart of it is a claim with real clinical consequences: when human dignity is grounded in who a person is rather than what they can do, it becomes something no diagnosis, no group label, and no lapse in functioning can take away. That grounding is what protects clients against being quietly reduced to a category — the safeguard, as the panel puts it, against racism, sexism, and subordinating the individual to the collective.