Eckhard Frick - Böcker

Many people are looking for authentic and truthful spiritual experiences. In doing so, they might cross confessional and religious boundaries in order to come to the personal, existential interior of religion. In an interdisciplinary exchange between spiritual care and philosophy, this work examines the spiritual turn and explores the spiritual search and its relevance for everyday life. This work examines this spiritual turn in an interdisciplinary exchange between spiritual care and philosophy. The focus is on describing spiritual experiences from philosophical perspectives and the presence and relevance of spirituality in everyday life. These reflections on spirituality address the connections between self-knowledge and self-transcendence. Together with spirituality, they touch on ethics, the recognition of boundaries, the willingness to cross borders, and spirituality as an element of the physical experience of health and disease. This discourse opens up a therapeutic horizon - especially when the question of meaning arises in life crises. It can provide stimuli for developing spiritual care in science, in practice, and in the context of health services.

Das Arbeitsfeld des „Spiritual Care“ entwickelt sich interdisziplinär an den Schnittstellen von Medizin, Pflege, Sozialer Arbeit, Psychotherapie, Seelsorge und anderen relevanten Bereichen. Begriffliche Klarheit ist nötig, um über Fächergrenzen hinweg kooperieren zu können. Das „Begriffslexikon Spiritual Care“ greift auf Vorarbeiten in der gleichnamigen Zeitschrift zurück, in der bereits in loser Folge Begriffe als „Stichwort“ erläutert wurden.

The interdisciplinary book series Studies in Spiritual Care (SCC) publishes international research ranging from studies on specific aspects of Spiritual Care to programmatic contributions to the self-understanding of this new practice and research area. The series is of interest to professionals working in the field as well as to students, researchers, and scholars from the fields of medicine, pastoral care, psychotherapy, and social work.

Spiritual Care aims at supporting the spiritual needs of patients. From a secular view, Spiritual Care can be interpreted with the help of central notions of Karl Jaspers, such as “boundary situation” and “existential elucidation”.Jaspers’ concept of the “boundary situation” refers to the fundamental boundaries of action and life, such as struggle, guilt, suffering and death. Human life always remains within these boundaries, but this is experienced in a special way in particular situations. According to Jaspers, such situations are experienced as boundary situations if this experience leads to “existential elucidation”, namely to an attitude that comprehends and acknowledges life’s fundamental boundaries.Boundary situations can occur in the context of the health-care sector. Patients, for example, who have to endure severe physical or emotional suffering or are confronted with their own death due to a terminal illness can experience their situation as a boundary situation in the sense of Jaspers.The contributions of this volume discuss the notion of boundary situation from philosophical, literary, and psychological perspectives and explore the question of how to support patients in boundary situations against this background.