Studies in Spiritual Care

Spiritual care is an important component of patient treatment. Research has shown that health professionals frequently do not feel like they have the competence to integrate spirituality into their work. This volume examines spiritual care competence from a philosophical and empirical perspective, focusing on health professionals in training and helping to promote awareness of the spiritual in the healthcare system.

Seelsorge ist schon lange in medizinethische Fragestellungen involviert und beteiligt sich auch an ethischen Beratungsstrukturen in Kliniken. Im Zuge der zunehmenden Professionalisierung der Medizinethik wie auch der Seelsorge, und im Zusammenhang mit der Einbindung von Seelsorge in die interdisziplinäre Spiritual Care, rückt seit einiger Zeit die Frage nach dem ethischen Profil und der ethischen Qualifikation von Seelsorge stärker in den Blick der theologischen Forschung. Der vorliegende Band versammelt Beiträge, die sich aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven – Ethik, Seelsorgetheorie, Spiritual Care und Philosophie – mit der grundlegenden Verhältnisbestimmung zwischen Ethik, Seelsorge und Spiritual Care auseinandersetzen. Im kritischen Dialog der verschiedenen disziplinären Zugänge zu gemeinsamen thematischen Schnittfeldern werden Gegenstände, Methoden und auch Defizite der jeweiligen Ansätze klarer konturiert. So wird sichtbar, welche Impulse sich für die Weiterentwicklung der Konzepte von Ethik, Seelsorge und Spiritual Care ergeben.

Christian healthcare chaplains are specialized professionals with a double belonging. They are part of the Christian faith community, and — at the same time – of an inter- and trans-religious professional group in the healthcare sector. This book responds to the tension that arises from this dual belonging and argues that it should be consciously and creatively embraced in a time of change. The increasing complexity and specialization of healthcare, the shift towards outpatient care, mounting economic pressures, the demographic and epidemiological transitions towards chronic and elderly care, and global health crises are profoundly transforming and challenging healthcare chaplaincy. In this volume, leading scholars and practitioners engage with this rapid change as a moment of opportunity. They address the role of Christian healthcare chaplains, and clarify their theological basis, their professional competencies, and the future of their education and training. Together, they articulate a shared vision for the future of Christian healthcare chaplaincy which contributes to a better healthcare by expanding, deepening, and completing medical practice.

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.

Interviews with seniors living in long-term care facilities shed light on their spiritual needs and experiences in times of crisis. They stand in contrast to the perspectives of employees, who are supposed to identify those needs and contribute to their fulfillment. An analysis and comparison of statements made by both groups provides a basis on which to draw conclusions about care work in inpatient elderly care.

Sigmund Freud saw Judaism’s aniconism as "progress in Geistigkeit" on the way to enlightened spirituality, which he believed was the objective of psychoanalysis as a treatment and cultural theory. Unlike the widespread interpretation that equates Freud’s critique of religion with psychoanalytical atheism, this volume reveals the significance of the search for the spiritual in current psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Spiritual care is often equated with caring for sick people who are trying to find meaning in their suffering. This volume confronts talk of meaning with the concept of motivation – that is, with the willingness to invest time and energy into pursuing a goal. Specialists from the fields of philosophy, medicine, psychology, and theology inquire into the external and inner criteria for an authentic spirituality of human action.

This volume contributes to an emerging field that could be referred to as "plural spiritual care and chaplaincy". It's innovative approach brings together contributions from a broad range of contexts and religious traditions and includes empirical work and conceptual explorations. It helps to fill the gap between practices and developments related to plural spiritual care and chaplaincy in the scholarly discourse.

This book brings together studies on how congregations have resources which can promote health with a focus on accompanying people with depression as well as how congregations can be sensitized to mental health and the needs of persons living with mental disorders. In this collaboration, a close connection between research-studies was combined with a congregation-based implementation. In addition, a selection of surveys provide deep insights into the interaction between pastoral care, medical health care projects and spiritual care as a new discipline.

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.

The need to take the spiritual experience during illness into account is part of a broader trend in Western societies—a fascination with the practical uses of spirituality and its contribution to individual wellbeing, whether through a religious or a humanist tradition. This understanding of spirituality differs from traditional views embedded in religious traditions. This book takes a critical point of view at the biomedical representation of the function of spirituality in care. Medicine reorders notions such as life, death, health, sickness, and spirituality. This process is called here “sapientialization”, i.e. the spiritual experience is expressed and understood under the auspices of and in terms of wisdom. This view tends to identify spirituality and ethics. I propose an alternate understanding of spirituality, grounded on its subversive power. Inspired by the work of the theologian John D. Caputo, it is critical of some problems that are associated with the sapientialization of spirituality in biomedicine, such as the medicalization of spiritual experiences or the instrumentalization of spirituality. It provides an understanding of spirituality that honours both the medical interest in it and its capacity to resist to instrumentalization.

End-of-life research has long recognized the importance of narrative at the end of life. This volume draws on this work and explores narratives at and about the end of life from different perspectives. It focuses especially on testing the concept of the “death narrative.”

Since the 1990s, the numbers of Jewish communities in Bavaria have increased tenfold due to an influx of refugees. Many immigrants from the GUS states, however, brought physical and mental health problems with them and the mortality rate in these communities far exceeds their birth rate. The present study analyses this situation for the first time, focusing especially on how communities cope with these challenges.

The wish to understand the symbolic language of the dying has long been a fundamental concern of spiritual care. This volume provides an interdisciplinary overview from different specialized fields (pastoral care, nursing, psychotherapy, and psychiatry). The essays elucidate different forms of symbolic communication as well as the possibilities they create for spiritual guidance at the end of life.

In the face of death, people often experience intense visual experiences. Our understanding of such phenomena has grown in recent years. For the first time, based on current research and personal reports, this study examines the different forms taken by such imagery in this unique realm of experience. The study illuminates their meaningfulness, and also explores their potential relevance for spiritual guidance.