Bücher der Reihe Emerging Perspectives in Pastoral Theology and Care

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.

This book explores the work, experience, language, and ambiguity of the profession of chaplaincy, tracing its struggles to professionalize in the hospital while caring for the human experiences of death and decline within its walls.

Women Leaving Prison uses qualitative research methods to uncover the spiritual and religious experiences of female returning citizens. The findings ground the call for a revised prison ministry praxis that details how people of faith and concerned citizens can facilitate returning sisters' successful reentry and work to remove current injustices.

This book explores the concepts of care, faith, power, and community as a framework for addressing local and global problems linked to neoliberal capitalism, racism and classism.

Digital technologies and the advance of artificial intelligence are changing human nature. This book explores implications for pastoral and spiritual care providers, religious faith communities, clinical practitioners, and educators and asserts the need for theological reflection about both the existential risk and the opportunities of this change.

This book expands on moral injury discourse and defines a new approach to conceptualizing and addressing moral injuries by articulating a new term-moral orienting systems-that better describes the process of morally significant traumas.

What role do religious narratives play in the elevated rates of suicide attempt among LGBTQ people? Taking a narrative approach to first-person accounts, this book addresses the potential violence of theological narratives upon queer souls and contributes to constructive methods of intervention toward the livability of life for queer people.

Before Belief explores our first spiritual awareness, before language and cognitive understanding. This unconscious spiritual learning, beginning in infancy, is foundational for a relationship with God. The theoretical approach advanced in this volume is both constructive and pastorally sensitive.

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.

How to improve your spiritual growth? The author, creator of the Speed ¿¿Method, presents a theoretical-practical training manual which becomes an opportunity and a concrete support for the counselors in view of a new spiritual springtime for the Church and human care.

The author resists identity politics through a postcolonial political pastoral care and praxis that decolonizes biopolitical governmentalities, reframes hegemonic and fragmented identities, and restores the in-between spaces and in-between subjectivities of Ethiopians.

This book considers the challenges and opportunities of the Anthropocene Age from the perspective of pastoral theology/care. The fundamental question and concern with regard to the Anthropocene Age for human beings and other species is, how are we to dwell together on this one earth. Care, LaMothe argues, is the central concept in answering this question. Effective care requires pastoral theologians to make use of multiple interpretive frameworks (e.g., theology, philosophy, human sciences, etc.) in the analytic pursuit of understanding and responding effectively to the realities of climate change. At the same time, it is also important for pastoral theologians to examine critically the theologies and philosophies that give rise to and impede pastoral interventions and, in the case of the Anthropocene Age, to be clear about how theologies and philosophies have contributed to ideologies that undergird both exploitation of the earth and other-than-human beings, while also contributing to climate change and obstructing climate action. These are necessary steps in developing pastoral responses aimed at caring for persons, communities, and other-than-human beings in need of a viable dwelling.

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 AIs algorithms are identified. These biases can be minimized through the incorporation of pastoral virtues as values guiding AI.