Volume 26, Issue 1

Can listening as one listens to or reads poetry complement narrative approaches in pastoral care? The fragmented, open ended, metaphorical and episodic character of what people tell in pastoral encounters is often more like poetry than story. Applying instruments of poetic analysis to what people tell, opens new insights into those texts, whether originally written or oral. That experimental, heuristic practice in poetic reading finds a complement in reflections on characteristics of poetry and on narrative and poetic modes of practical theology. That results in a congeniality of theological and poetic reading in attention to metaphor, fragments, framing and reframing.

In this article, I investigate search for meaning in life and transcendence in spouses of people with mental illness. Research related to the topic is scant. I interviewed 16 Finnish spouses and partners in narrative, semi-structured interviews, and analyzed the data narratively. The interviewees perceived mental illness as a threat to meaning. In the search for meaning, transcendence referred to hope, humor, wishing, and imagining. The search for meaning and transcendence were connected through the fragile “sense of something else for me” as detachment from the spouse’s illness reality. Implications for pastoral theology can be found above all in Christian hope.

This article examines how the systemic sin of neoliberalism affects pandemic relationships, specifically considering how its emphasis on autonomy can result in relational abuse and erode a recognition of our fundamental interdependence as human beings. To contextualize the argument, this article employs a case study of tip baiting in the United States during the COVID-19 crisis to explain how neoliberalism concretely results in harm that can be identified as a form of systemic sin.

In a qualitative study in 2012, Michael Ebertz and colleagues constructed characteristic types of processes of leaving the Roman Catholic Church in the Freiburg area of southern Germany. This article aims to replicate and supplement Ebertz’ findings through the analysis of problem-centered interviews of former Roman-Catholics in the north-western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. With one exception, the types of processes could be replicated, and four additional types were added. The results show that processes of leaving the church are diverse and in many cases result from a long and complex process.

This article focuses on the growing, yet under-researched, phenomenon of co-leadership in which spouses lead congregations together as pastor couples. The study addresses the topic from the perspective of organizational leadership, probing the experiences of leading together among pastor couples in the Norwegian Pentecostal movement. Systematic text condensation of in-depth interviews showed that the participants described co-leadership as all-encompassing and tension-filled, constantly having to balance private and professional concerns in addition to managing expectations from congregants and global church culture. Amidst these challenges, they described unity in diversity and a sense of being called to lead the church together.

While social scientists have long studied secrecy as a cultural practice, theologians have neglected it as an ecclesial practice. This article examines “segmented secrecy” as an ecclesial practice, that is, secrets kept or divulged in different social networks in a segmented manner. That secrecy is examined in the lives of gay priests in Roman Catholic ecclesial settings in the United States. After a brief sociological analysis of secrecy, the theological analysis reckons first with the ethics of segmented secrecy, arguing for segmented secrecy as a “burdened” form of the virtue of honesty. Next it turns to segmented secrecy as an ecclesial practice, a provisional way of securing protection for marginal persons amidst the larger eschatological protect of the church in the world, despite some moral hazards involved.

Religion plays a major part in the changes that have taken place with regard to the recognition of rights of Lesbian, Gay, Transgender, Bisexual and Intersex (LGBTI) people. In today’s world, growing activism around sexual and gender diversity meets increased hostility towards LGBTI people. This research article presents the design of a collaborative research project to explore and investigate the empirical situation of European churches towards inclusivity of LGBTI people.

This article describes the long-term research project on confirmation work in Europe which is carried out in ten countries, and discusses it as an example of international cooperative and comparative research in practical theology. Against the background of an increasing demand for international research in practical theology on the one hand and the far-reaching lack of respective studies which is demonstrated by an analysis of the articles published in IJPT on the other, major results and methodological questions from the project on confirmation work are presented. In a final section, the advantages as well as the challenges of international cooperative and comparative research are discussed.