The question of how best to name those who are most vulnerable to precarity and exploitation is both a conceptual and political one. It has been tempting in recent years to consider vulnerability as the foundation for a new politics, but that is an error. Vulnerability cannot be isolated as a new ground for politics. It is always contextual since it belongs to the organization of embodied and social relations. Vulnerability can neither be isolated from the constellation of rage, persistence, and resistance that emerges under specific historical conditions, nor can it be the basis for a new humanism. Rather, the differential exposure of bodies to abandonment, illness, and death, belong to a sphere of power that regulates the grievability of human lives, linked to the climate crisis and the demand for a new political vocabulary that moves beyond anthropocentrism. The differential scheme that governs the grievability of lives is a central component of social inequality at the same time that it belongs to forms of institutional violence that target communities and establish their precarity, if not their dispensability. If and when a population is (or is treated as) grievable, they can be acknowledged as a living population whose deaths would be grieved if their lives were lost. To assert the grievability of human life under conditions in which those lives have already been abandoned is to make a political claim against abandonment, for sustainable infrastructure, and for both the grievability and value of those lives. Mourning is thus linked with public protest, Vulnerability is the possibility of injury, but also of responsive and radical politics, one that asserts continued bodily existence as a form of persistence.
In recent years, some within chaplaincy have advocated for a stronger focus on outcomes, including outcome research, whereas others in the field have questioned an outcome-oriented perspective. In this article, existing outcome studies are reviewed in relation to the ongoing discussion about a processor outcome-oriented approach to chaplaincy. A central question emerges from this discussion: how can outcome research be designed that respects the integrity of the profession of chaplaincy? A literature search in MEDLINE/Pubmed produced twenty-two chaplaincy outcome studies that met the inclusion criteria. A review of these studies shows that thus far most have focused on secondary chaplaincy outcomes (e.g., satisfaction) using quantitative designs. To respect the integrity of chaplaincy,
Research suggests that prison visitation by volunteers may significantly reduce the risk of recidivism. Community volunteers offer sustained, prosocial support to inmates which may account for these beneficial effects. However, the question of how inmates themselves evaluate volunteer visitation has hardly been studied. This study explores how inmates of Dutch prisons who receive one-on-one volunteer visits experience and value these visits. To that end, semistructured interviews were conducted with 21 inmates across six penitentiaries. These show that the value of volunteer visitation for inmates has to be understood in terms of a human-to-human encounter. Visits by volunteers provide inmates with rare opportunities to have a confidential conversation, away from the harshness of the usual prison life. Furthermore, inmates perceive volunteer visitation as beneficial beyond the actual visits. Inmates draw hope, strength, or self-respect from the conversations; they see volunteers as role models and develop a more positive view of the future. Two potential obstacles to beneficial volunteer visitation were detected: lack of chemistry between volunteer and inmate and imposition of worldview beliefs by volunteers.
In ‘a secular age’ (Taylor 2007), pastoral care is no longer exclusively associated with specific religious traditions and communities. Pastoral caregivers who work in secular institutions provide care to religious and nonreligious people alike, and in several Western societies the term pastoral care is used in relation to nonreligious (humanist) care. In secular contexts, the term ‘pastoral care’ is often replaced by the term ‘spiritual care.’ Spiritual care, however, is provided by various professionals, so pastoral caregivers face the challenge of developing adequate and convincing language to explain what is distinctive about their work. In this article, the authors turn to philosophical language in order to develop a conceptual understanding of pastoral care that does not depend on the specific worldview—religious or nonreligious—of either pastoral caregivers or receivers of pastoral care. Using the work of Taylor (1989, 2007) and Murdoch (1970), we explain pastoral care as engaging with people’s attempts to orient in ‘moral space’ and the distinctive quality of pastoral care as ‘representing the Good.’ Murdoch associates ‘the Good’ with a secular idea of transcendence that is both a movement beyond the ego and an engagement with the reality of human vulnerability, suffering, and evil. We argue that pastoral caregivers who ‘represent the Good’ have the task not only of supporting the existential and spiritual processes of individuals but also of promoting dialogue and social justice and of critiquing dehumanizing practices in the organizations in which they work and in society at large.
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