Emerging Perspectives in Pastoral Theology and Care – serie

The Paradox of Trauma and Growth in Pastoral and Spiritual Care: Night Blooming introduces and bridges the gap between the psychological and spiritual perspectives and responses in trauma work, illuminating the complexity of the human phenomenon of growth though suffering that is too easily misunderstood in the context of pastoral and spiritual care. Through the hopeful metaphor of night bloomers, rare plants that grow because of light, but bloom in the darkness, it is suggested that while psychological trauma is inherently negative, and suffering creates a spiritual inner night, moving through it may reveal a new, complex reality of the human experience not previously understood. We may see ourselves, others, or the world in a way that is stronger, wiser, deeper, or more brilliant than we had known before. The book presents the goal of pastoral and spiritual work is not to extinguish darkness. Nor is it to solely focus on the light. The work is to learn how to stay awake through the night, without glorifying it. Such a task is far easier when we believe there might be a rare and uniquely beautiful bloom to stay awake for, and that witnessing such a bloom could have great consequences for living a meaningful life.

This book invites readers, particularly clergy members, to rethink their understandings of the human person in light of recent developments in neuroscience. In addition to bringing together religion and neuroscience, it engages narrative theory, exercise physiology, and constructions of wellness to raise crucial questions about human identity and relationality and argue for a model of care that connects self-care and care for/with others. Furthermore, it claims that human beings are whole, intra/inter-relational, dynamic, plastic, and performative agents who have the capacity to story themselves neurophysiologically (in both “top-down” and “bottom-up” ways) through their regular practices of wellness.

Women Leaving Prison examines the oft-ignored experiences of female returning citizens, our returning sisters, who face numerous individual and systemic barriers as they return to life beyond bars. In the age of mass incarceration, with 700,000 inmates leaving prison each year, spiritual and religious support during reentry is a crucial component of prison ministry. Women Leaving Prison describes women’s pathways to prison, their spiritual and religious experiences inside, and then utilizes interpretative phenomenological analysis, a qualitative research method, to uncover the spiritual and religious beliefs and practices of returning sisters. The findings from the qualitative study then ground the book’s call for a revised prison ministry praxis, entitled Project Sister Connect, that details how churches, as well as concerned citizens and people of faith, can welcome and care for returning sisters. Project Sister Connect offers a model for facilitating female returning citizens’ successful reentry via communal and individual spiritual care and support and by working toward the eradication of structural injustices.

This book explores the growing awareness, brought on by the recent explosion of communication technology, that all human beings are citizens of the world. Ryan LaMothe argues that this awareness comes with an urgent need to address political issues, systems, and structures at local, state, and international levels that harm human beings and our one habitat. Through the lens of pastoral theology, LaMothe analyzes the concepts of care, faith, power, and community as they are related to addressing local and global problems linked to neoliberal capitalism, racism and classism.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing what it means to be human. Given our increasing merger with machines, we have therefore entered uncharted territory and an era of unprecedented change. For pastoral and spiritual care providers, religious faith communities, clinical practitioners, and educators, immediate theological reflection is needed, focusing on the potential existential threat and opportunity, and what will constitute human personhood in an age of technological enhancement. Preserving our humanity in a digital age will require intentional focus on strengthening the neural circuitry associated with focused attention, mindful and compassionate awareness, and social and relational intelligence, even as we put to good use the emerging digital technologies.

The concept of moral injury emerged in the past decade as a way to understand how traumatic levels of moral emotions generate moral anguish experienced by some military service members. Interdisciplinary research on moral injury has included clinical psychologists (Litz et al., 2009; Drescher et al., 2011), theologians (Brock & Lettini, 2012; Graham, 2017), ethicists (Kinghorn, 2012), and philosophers (Sherman, 2015). This project articulates a new key concept—moral orienting systems— a dynamic matrix of meaningful values, beliefs, behaviors, and relationships learned and changed over time and through formative experiences and relationships such as family of origin, religious and other significant communities, mentors, and teachers. Military recruit training reengineers pre-existing moral orienting systems and indoctrinates a military moral orienting system designed to support functioning within the military context and the demands of the high-stress environment of combat, including immediate responses to perceived threat. This military moral orienting system includes new values and beliefs, new behaviors, and new meaningful relationships. Recognizing the profound impact of military recruit training, this project challenges dominant notions of post-deployment reentry and reintegration, and formulates a new paradigm for first, understanding the generative circumstances of ongoing moral stress that include moral emotions like guilt, shame, disgust, and contempt, and, second, for responding to such human suffering through compassionate care and comprehensive restorative support. This project calls for more effective participation of religious communities in the reentry and reintegration process and for a military-wide post-deployment reentry program comparable to the encompassing physio-psycho-spiritual-social transformative intensity experienced in recruit-training boot camp.

The concept of moral injury emerged in the past decade as a way to understand how traumatic levels of moral emotions generate moral anguish experienced by some military service members. Interdisciplinary research on moral injury has included clinical psychologists (Litz et al., 2009; Drescher et al., 2011), theologians (Brock & Lettini, 2012; Graham, 2017), ethicists (Kinghorn, 2012), and philosophers (Sherman, 2015). This project articulates a new key concept—moral orienting systems— a dynamic matrix of meaningful values, beliefs, behaviors, and relationships learned and changed over time and through formative experiences and relationships such as family of origin, religious and other significant communities, mentors, and teachers. Military recruit training reengineers pre-existing moral orienting systems and indoctrinates a military moral orienting system designed to support functioning within the military context and the demands of the high-stress environment of combat, including immediate responses to perceived threat. This military moral orienting system includes new values and beliefs, new behaviors, and new meaningful relationships. Recognizing the profound impact of military recruit training, this project challenges dominant notions of post-deployment reentry and reintegration, and formulates a new paradigm for first, understanding the generative circumstances of ongoing moral stress that include moral emotions like guilt, shame, disgust, and contempt, and, second, for responding to such human suffering through compassionate care and comprehensive restorative support. This project calls for more effective participation of religious communities in the reentry and reintegration process and for a military-wide post-deployment reentry program comparable to the encompassing physio-psycho-spiritual-social transformative intensity experienced in recruit-training boot camp.

Why is loss present but rarely spoken of in the hospital system? How does such silence carry over to the practices of chaplains who accompany dying patients and grieving families? Richard Coble critically examines his experiences as a hospital chaplain to analyze the place of spiritual care in wider trends vexing healthcare today, including its persistent disparities and its related inability to reckon with human decline. Simultaneously, he offers routes for chaplains to be a force of change.

The author presents a theoretical-practical training manual with effective tools for everyone, especially counselors to improve their spiritual growth. The Speed Method, integrating Lonergan’s theory with the practice of counseling, becomes a concrete opportunity in view of a new spiritual springtime for the Church and human care.

The author argues that identity politics eliminates Ethiopians' in-between spaces and identities and defines in-between spaces as political, social, religious, and geographical spaces that enable Ethiopians to co-exist with equity, solidarity, and justice. The elimination of in-between spaces and in-between identities creates either-or class, religious, ethnic, and gender categories. Therefore, the author proposes an in-between theology that invites Ethiopians to a new hybrid way of being to resist fragmented and hegemonic identities. The author claims that postcolonial discourse and praxis of in-between pastoral care disrupts and interrogates hegemonic definitions of culture, home, subjectivity, and identity. On the other hand, in-between pastoral care uses embodiment, belonging, subjectivity, and hybridity as features of care and praxis to create intercultural and intersubjective identities that can co-construct and co-create in-between spaces. In the in-between spaces, Ethiopians can relate with the Other with intercultural competencies to live their difference, similarity, hybridity, and complexity.

A Womanist Holistic Soteriology: Stitching Fabrics with Fine Threads is a construction of womanist holistic soteriology that is inclusive of many voices and perspectives and promotes communal responsibility. A soteriology that considers notions of personhood, theology, spirituality, and praxeology is holistic, inclusive, and grace-filled. This soteriological study begins with a historical overview of the development of notions of salvation beginning in ancient Egyptian thought and the concept of Ma’at—balance, wholeness, and moral ethics. Lahronda Welch Little conducts an exploration of the word “salvation” in different West African languages and reveals more expansive narratives around salvation that do not subjugate human beings, but rather encourage agency and celebrate the beingness of God’s creation. Grounded in womanist and Black feminist discourse and methodology, this rendition of womanist holistic soteriology holds notions of grace, agency, and spirituality by stitching together interviews with theologians, scholars, and practitioners, utilizing the philosophical concepts of binary complementarity and holism, and sharing what womanist holistic soteriology as praxis looks like in a communal setting.

Emerging as Affirmative Pastoral Caregivers Beyond Gender Binaries: Gender Creative Promise uniquely brings a gender diverse theological imagination to the field of pastoral theology, supplemented by deploying a “gender creative” interpretative lens on scripture. The reader is introduced to an array of persons diverse in their gender variance, four continua of gender (sex, identity, expression, attraction), a gender affirmative psychotherapeutic model as a template for the field of pastoral theology, common resilience strategies that transgender persons employ in the face of cultural oppression and aspersion, benefits derived from religious affiliation that can enhance resilience, and scripturally-based principles for delivering affirmative pastoral caregiving beyond gender binaries. The author encourages readers to look within and wrestle with the complexities of their own gendered selves while journeying alongside him to emerge as pastoral change-makers in their places of teaching, ministry, and caregiving.

Children remain at the periphery when bioethics envisions autonomous adults as normative human beings. Children, Theology, and Bioethics: Beyond Autonomy explores the full humanity of children, inviting greater recognition of their place in the moral landscape of healthcare. Theological insights into vulnerability, dependence, and agency summon appreciation for the experiences of pediatric patients and reveal what it means to be human at every age. Interdisciplinary dialogue between bioethics, childhood studies, and pastoral theology is woven throughout with illustrative clinical vignettes from Bratt Carle’s experience as a pediatric chaplain and clinical ethicist.

This book explores the full humanity of children, inviting greater recognition of their place in the moral landscape of healthcare. Children remain at the periphery when bioethics envisions autonomous adults as normative human beings. This book engages in interdisciplinary dialogue, weaving together bioethics, childhood studies, and pastoral theology, with illustrative clinical vignettes from the author's experience as a pediatric chaplain and clinical ethicist. Theological insights into vulnerability, dependence, and agency summon appreciation for the experiences of pediatric patients and reveal what it means to be human at every age.

This book grapples with the many layers of Black girlhood as a source for theological reflection. Doing so gives voice to Black girlhood experiences and disrupts Black girlhood erasure in religion and society. This book also demonstrates how lived experiences of Black girls inform theologies of care, which is important for divinity/seminary faculty and students as well as clergy. Since inception, womanist theology interrogates the social construction of being Black and female and centers these interlocking experiences as a primary source in theological reflection. However, noticeably absent from womanist theology are the actual voices of Black girls. The problems with this exclusion are epistemological and developmental. Epistemologically, Black girls’ voices are rarely sought out as a source of knowledge, and developmentally, Black girls appear to be born women.

How might someone’s disability shape not only their view of God, but of the church? Turning to the lived experiences of people with disabilities and caregivers for children with disabilities, this book provides theological reflections on their images of the church. Attuning to these often ignored voices provides thought-provoking insights into what the church and other religious communities can do and have failed to do for and alongside its disabled members and their caregivers. Embracing disability theology enables a generative image of faith communities built on various forms of spiritual care. Over three broad sections (Disabling Images of the Church, Themes in Healing the Church with Disabilities, and Intercultural Insights for Disability Theology), theologians explore the themes and images emerging from alternative views of the church and other religious communities presented by disability studies.

While garnering the attention of professionals across disciplines, from medicine to public health to psychology, and frequently covered as a topic of public concern in the news media, the elevated occurrence of suicide attempts among LGBTQ persons has received little attention within the literature of theology and religious studies. This book fills that lacuna by addressing the role that religious, spiritual, and theological narratives play in shaping the souls of queer folk. Taking a narrative approach to qualitative interview material from LGBTQ individuals who survived their suicide attempts, Cody J. Sanders argues that theological narratives can operate violently upon the souls of LGBTQ people in ways that make life precarious and, at time, seem unlivable. The book critically addresses the violence of theological narratives upon queer souls, filling a crucial void in scholarship concerning the role of religion—specifically Christianity—in LGBTQ suicide. Ultimately, the author draws upon the interview material to move readers toward constructive methods of contributing to the resistance and resilience of queer souls in relation to soul violence, asking how we can intervene with practices of care in order to cultivate livability of life for queer people.

First things are spiritually and theologically important. Before Belief explores the precognitive human experience of transcendence, illuminating how such foundational experiences are formative of attachment relationships with people and ultimately with God. The book proposes an implicit learning model rather than rely on Freud’s or Jung’s understanding of the unconscious, with a goal of recovering unconscious spiritual learning. Once discovered and put into language, early learning needs to be tested and integrated into life experience and expressed in committed living. The theories examined and advanced in the work are also carried through in practical case studies that demonstrate the pastoral and clinical salience of understanding and connecting people to those grounding experiences.

Tilling Sacred Grounds examines Black women’s interiority and negotiation of race, gender, and sexuality in religious spaces and religious practices. Phillis Isabella Sheppard argues for the importance of the exchange between interiority and public spaces, and examines religion in cyberspace, art, ritual, and street ministry. She refigures the location of religious experience by retrieving Black women’s interiority as religious space. Often excluded from Black religious studies, interiority is necessary for understanding Black women’s complex and even unconscious relationship with religion. The book weaves a thread by stressing that interiority has subjective, intersubjective, conscious, unconscious, and relational dimensions formed in historical, and social contexts.

Tilling Sacred Grounds examines Black women’s interiority and negotiation of race, gender, and sexuality in religious spaces and religious practices. Phillis Isabella Sheppard argues for the importance of the exchange between interiority and public spaces, and examines religion in cyberspace, art, ritual, and street ministry. She refigures the location of religious experience by retrieving Black women’s interiority as religious space. Often excluded from Black religious studies, interiority is necessary for understanding Black women’s complex and even unconscious relationship with religion. The book weaves a thread by stressing that interiority has subjective, intersubjective, conscious, unconscious, and relational dimensions formed in historical, and social contexts.

Pastoral Virtues for Artificial Intelligence (AI) acknowledges that human destiny is intimately tied to artificial intelligence. AI already outperforms a person on most tasks. Our ever-deepening relationship with an AI that is increasingly autonomous mirrors our relationship to what is perceived as Sacred or Divine. Like God, AI awakens hope and fear in people, while giving life to some and taking livelihood, especially in the form of jobs, from others. AI, built around values of convenience, productivity, speed, efficiency, and cost reduction, serve humanity poorly, especially in moments that demand care and wisdom. This book explores the pastoral virtues of hope, patience, play, wisdom, and compassion as foundational to personal flourishing, communal thriving, and building a robust AI. Biases of determinism, speed, objectivity, ignorance, and apathy within AI's algorithms are identified. These biases can be minimized through the incorporation of pastoral virtues as values guiding AI.

Through the rich stories of eight participants, the author explores the psychological, spiritual, and ritual dimensions of religious trauma among queer people. Drawing on current scholarship in the field of trauma studies, the author makes a case for religious trauma as an important frame to understand the experiences of queer people in non-accepting faith communities. Though previous scholarship has limited the recovery from religious trauma to those who exit religious communities, in this research the author analyzes participant stories to understand how queer people might find healing in accepting religious communities. Using self-psychology to understand the depth of trauma experienced in non-accepting communities, the author explores the experience of God and sexual identity within non-accepting communities. Through these narratives, the author demonstrates the potential for post-traumatic growth and life beyond conservative faith communities. Petersen argues for a number of key recommendations for congregations and pastoral caregivers that seek to welcome those who have experienced religious trauma.

Through the rich stories of eight participants, the author explores the psychological, spiritual, and ritual dimensions of religious trauma among queer people. Drawing on current scholarship in the field of trauma studies, the author makes a case for religious trauma as an important frame to understand the experiences of queer people in non-accepting faith communities. Though previous scholarship has limited the recovery from religious trauma to those who exit religious communities, in this research the author analyzes participant stories to understand how queer people might find healing in accepting religious communities. Using self-psychology to understand the depth of trauma experienced in non-accepting communities, the author explores the experience of God and sexual identity within non-accepting communities. Through these narratives, the author demonstrates the potential for post-traumatic growth and life beyond conservative faith communities. Petersen argues for a number of key recommendations for congregations and pastoral caregivers that seek to welcome those who have experienced religious trauma.