Pub Date : 2023-02-24DOI: 10.1080/10649867.2023.2180580
R. Lamothe
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Pub Date : 2023-02-03DOI: 10.1080/10649867.2022.2156697
Millicent C. Feske
{"title":"Conceiving Family: A Practical Theology of Surrogacy and Self","authors":"Millicent C. Feske","doi":"10.1080/10649867.2022.2156697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10649867.2022.2156697","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29885,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pastoral Theology","volume":"33 1","pages":"142 - 145"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41564256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10649867.2023.2210341
Danjuma Gibson
ABSTRACT This article documents one of the plenary speeches given at the annual conference of the Society of Pastoral Theology in June 2022 in Montgomery, Alabama. The theme of the conference, Looking Back and Moving Forward, centered on an immersion experience at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. In this plenary address, the speaker invites the community of scholars and practitioners to imagine soul care through the work and person of twentieth-century literary artist James Baldwin. Four themes from the work of Baldwin are discussed as a way to enhance the work of pastoral scholars and spiritual caregivers: (1) locating soul-care on the correct arc of history, (2) identifying who you are writing for, (3) cultivating generativity as a practice of self-care and for the continuity of the struggle for freedom and, (4) practicing love as the next step beyond empathy.
{"title":"Doing Soul Care from a Region in My Mind: A Baldwinian Interpretation","authors":"Danjuma Gibson","doi":"10.1080/10649867.2023.2210341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/10649867.2023.2210341","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article documents one of the plenary speeches given at the annual conference of the Society of Pastoral Theology in June 2022 in Montgomery, Alabama. The theme of the conference, Looking Back and Moving Forward, centered on an immersion experience at The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. In this plenary address, the speaker invites the community of scholars and practitioners to imagine soul care through the work and person of twentieth-century literary artist James Baldwin. Four themes from the work of Baldwin are discussed as a way to enhance the work of pastoral scholars and spiritual caregivers: (1) locating soul-care on the correct arc of history, (2) identifying who you are writing for, (3) cultivating generativity as a practice of self-care and for the continuity of the struggle for freedom and, (4) practicing love as the next step beyond empathy.","PeriodicalId":29885,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Pastoral Theology","volume":"33 1","pages":"5 - 21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2023-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46041512","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10649867.2023.2204277
P. McCarroll
ABSTRACT Many have argued that the colonizing conceptual infrastructures of the so-called West normalize human exceptionalism and reinforce anthropocentric priorities all of which have enabled and perpetuated the climate crisis. The discipline of pastoral theology is no exception. Perhaps more than any other theological discipline, pastoral theology organizes our scholarship, teaching and practice around anthropocentric foci and goals—the living human document or web, practices of justice and care that address human suffering and serve human flourishing. While recent scholarship has done much to prioritize decolonizing approaches to justice and care, in many cases this continues through an anthropocentric lens. How do we re-imagine pastoral theology in ways that do not perpetuate the crisis but rather serve the thriving of life in all its forms? This paper explores responses to this question. First, I present a summary of literature on pastoral theology and the climate crisis so far. Second, I examine and critique the discipline’s embedded theo-anthropology through a discussion of imago Dei and related metaphors. Third, I explore some alternative theological motifs and sources that lean toward earth-centered, decolonizing approaches to pastoral theology.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10649867.2023.2210372
M. Moschella
This issue of the Journal is dedicated to remembering the conference proceedings of the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Society for Pastoral Theology, which was held in the historic city of Montgomery, Alabama. The theme of the meeting was Looking Back and Moving Forward: What Shall We Remember, What Shall We Forget? What made this conference unforgettable for those who attended was the immersion experience of visiting the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Built by Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative, these museums portray and memorialize the horrific history of the enslavement and lynching of Black people in the US, and further demonstrate the present-day legacy of this history in the practice of mass incarceration. The US currently incarcerates just under 2 million people in federal, state, or privately operated prisons or jails. This is the highest rate of incarceration in the world, representing a 500% increase over the last 40 years. Unlike in countries such as Norway, where the penal system seeks to rehabilitate and return prisoners to common life, in the US, prisons are heavily armed places where punishment, more than rehabilitation, appears to be the goal. Over 60 percent of prisoners in the US have black or brown skin. Economic status factors heavily into the equation between race and incarceration, as drug arrests are more frequently made in segregated, poorer neighborhoods, as opposed to on college campuses, where illegal drugs abound, but students are predominantly white. People who cannot afford bail or private legal representation are more likely to accept plea deals. The proliferation of plea deals results in increased felony convictions, convictions that cannot be erased from one’s record, and therefore impact one’s lifelong chances for employment, housing, education, and voting. Additionally, the collateral damage to children and families of incarcerated persons involves severe emotional and financial stress. Currently 2.7 million children have at least one parent in prison. The suffering that redounds to children and families of incarcerated persons is plainly unjust: they have not committed any crimes, but their lives are altered and their chances for survival and wellbeing are diminished when their loved ones and breadwinners are incarcerated. Historian Douglas Blackmon shows how the practice of mass incarceration is historically related to the institution of slavery and in fact is a new form of enslavement that functions to preserve racial and class divisions in this country. Michelle Alexander has made a similar case, calling mass incarceration ‘the new Jim Crow,’ and describing the ways it unfairly subjects Black and Brown people to bondage, creating a permanently disenfranchised caste of people whose chances of thriving once they get out of prison are
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10649867.2023.2210373
R. Hunter
David Kelsey, Weigle Professor Emeritus of Theology at Yale Divinity School, takes up an enormously important and seldom-discussed problem in this challenging and important book: how to refute the bad theology—what he calls, more politely, ‘problematic theology’—that frequently crops up when people suffer horrendous evils and tragedies, and when well-intentioned, pious caregivers try to console them with theological claims like: it’s God’s will, or there is a reason such events have happened, or they are part of a divine plan, or ‘God never sends more suffering than you can bear.’ Such bromides may be ‘the platitudes of conventional wisdom,’ but they are profoundly wrong, according to Kelsey. Wrong because they misrepresent who and what God is and how God is related to the world. His objections to these claims are not, therefore, in the first instance, psychological. The problem lies deeper, in the ‘problematic theology’ that lies behind them. Human Anguish and God’s Power is an extended exposition of what a good (or better) theology could entail, one that, arguably, more profoundly fits the central theological thrust of the Bible and Christian faith and is also more respecting of and true to human experience. The book also shows why the popular, if problematic, account of things just won’t do. Kelsey writes as a systematic theologian, not as a practical or pastoral theologian. But though his thinking verges into pastoral theological pastures at various points, the true value of this book is its steady gaze at the theological ideas and insights underlying these difficult caregiving situations. His ideas have profound and actually counter intuitive implications not only for pastoral and other caregiving practices, but for the academic discipline of pastoral theology as well. Liberal pastoral theologians in particular will find this book both a highly innovative and creative intellectual work, but also a bracing and perhaps disturbing challenge to well-established liberal theological assumptions and perspectives in pastoral theology. It is, in any event, broadly conservative in its methodology if not in its theology, being rooted in an identification with the scriptures and much of the mainstream theological tradition of the church, especially perhaps the Reformed tradition (though it also departs from traditional theology in striking ways). Note: This book stands alongside Kelsey’s other works, especially his magnum opus, Eccentric Existence: A Theological Anthropology (two volumes), which can be usefully read to fill in many blanks that arise in Human Anguish and God’s Power. Kelsey’s little volume, Imagining Redemption, which is far more readable and also provides a helpful adjunct to Human Anguish, can also be a useful companion in helping to clarify Kelsey’s thinking. I will point out some of these supplemental places in what follows.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10649867.2023.2210374
Mary Elizabeth Toler
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/10649867.2023.2205229
B. Miller-McLemore
ABSTRACT Composed in response to the invitation to speak at the annual conference luncheon, this article offers reflections on my epistemological meanderings from maternal knowledge and children’s unique capacities to tree intelligence and pastoral theology’s special ways of knowing. Following the arc of life, however, it ultimately turns to the paradox of human foolishness (my own) and God’s wisdom, voicing what one aging specialist calls the countercultural role or prophetic vocation that can arise when people reach later life and begin to see the relativity of our work as we relinquish our callings. The article invites further reflection on the dynamics of relinquishing callings, the tensions between the academic life and the Christian life, and the need to hold our callings lightly, not absolutizing the work we do and recognizing the illusory and/or transient nature of many of the things to which we are drawn to give ourselves.
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Pub Date : 2022-09-02DOI: 10.1080/10649867.2022.2147654
Jaco J. Hamman
Welcome to this special issue of the Journal of Pastoral Theology. The issue was envisioned after the Editorial Board of the journal discussed the importance of forming and empowering future generations of pastoral caregivers and theologians, while being a conversation partner in the continuing education of experienced care providers and pastoral theologians. It seeks to increase caregiver competence and theological reflection as we build a just world where persons can grow and flourish. We imagine that the essays in this issue will meet these goals and be widely used in especially introductory seminars in pastoral theology or pastoral care and counseling. It is a privilege to come alongside persons and communities as a pastoral caregiver, to partner with the environment to secure a sustainable future for the earth. How shall one define pastoral theology and the care it informs? James Dittes, who was a key figure in the early years of the discipline, saw pastoral theology and care as ‘making space, leaving space, for others to move into and to grow.’ Pastoral theologian Barbara McClure complements this definition when she defines her discipline as ‘the art of paying attention’ in the service of ‘promoting the flourishing of all.’ ‘Attending is similar to, but distinct from, some of the more recognizable terms in our field. Listening, holding space, being a non-anxious presence, being with, and developing self-awareness are all venerable terms, as are the theological concepts of prayerfulness, meditation, and discernment,’ McClure writes. Pastoral care, simply put, is the art of creating space for others to grow. How does one become a competent, compassionate caregiver? Like an artist who slowly progresses on the path of mastery of their trade, care and creating space for others is never an easy task. Rather, it demands the ability to engage oneself in mindful reflection, to enter into relationships, to empathically imagine what another is experiencing, thinking theologically and spiritually, holding psychological, sociological, and scientific knowledge, reading intersectional systems, awakening hope, and more. For novice and seasoned caregivers alike, care is a challenging, sometimes elusive art. We need not be ‘perfect’ to be an effective caregiver, just ‘good enough,’ as our first essay argues. ‘No [person],’ writes Seward Hiltner in his classic 1958 text, Preface to Pastoral Theology,
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