"Getting Started" in Practical Theology?

From time to time, colleagues or students ask me for a reference to a good, readable, basic introduction to practical theology. In my view, the recent compendium edited by Bonnie Miller-McLemore, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), is the best single-volume book in English that shows the scope and complexity of varieties of practical theology today. However, that’s a lot to take in. (Over 600 pages, to be exact.) Sometimes it helps to start smaller. So I’ve taken two approaches.
The first approach: From a Protestant perspective, I often recommend the first chapter of Richard Osmer’s book Practical Theology: An Introduction (Eerdmans, 2008). That chapter outlines what Osmer calls the “four tasks” of practical theology. From a Catholic point of view, I recommend James Sweeney’s chapter “Catholic Theology and Practice Today,” in James Sweeney, Gemma Simmonds, and David Lonsdale (eds.), Keeping Faith in Practice (SCM, 2010). I recommend these because they accessibly show some of the far-reaching theological work of the field, and they also manifest various limitations of  prevailing discourses in practical theology.
A second approach: Focus on what is contested about the field and its methods and purposes, and for that, one could start with Kathleen Cahalan and Gordon Mikoski’s (eds.) Opening the Field of Practical Theology (Rowman and Littlefield, 2014). In that book, begin, say, with the chapters on African-American, Asian-American, Latino/a, Feminist and Womanist, and White approaches to practical theology.
The first approach focuses on consensus (which is never really adequate to describe what’s happening), and the second focuses on contestation (which can sometimes mask a deeper consensus) as ways of understanding practical theology. But this is just one tiny way of proceeding in a much larger sea of literature.
What would you recommend?
Tom Beaudoin, New York City