This article explores children's spirituality and its significance for health care providers seeking to provide "spiritually competent care" of children amidst religious and spiritual diversity. Four metaphors of different spiritualities evidenced among children are explored: mystics, activists, sages, and holy fools. The article addresses issues clinicians face such as the problem of defining spirituality in relation to religion, and countertransference around religious and spiritual matters. Current research shows that spiritual and religious involvements constitute positive factors promoting resiliency and health in children. James W. Fowler's theory of faith development facilitates an exploration of questions concerning how children develop a belief system, leading to a view of children's spirituality as multidimensional.
This article explores transformational learning theory as a framework for education in congregations concerned with fostering critical theological thinking and action among lay adult Christians. Beginning with a rationale for fostering critical theological thinking among adults in churches based on the assumption that all Christians (lay and ordained) are called to ministry, the article describes one framework for doing such education known as transformational learning. Initially developed by Jack Mezirow in secular educational contexts, this perspective has been critiqued and appropriated by many including some religious educators as a helpful way to understand and foster adult learning. The article critically examines transformational learning theory for use in ecclesial contexts.Is critical theological thinking reserved for the clergy, or do lay people in congregations also need such skills for their practices of faith? While most official commentary from Protestant church authorities affirms an egalitarian view of the relations between clergy and laity and their vocations, differences in the type of theological education to which each has access creates huge disparities in capacities for critical theological praxis (i.e., action and reflection for the purpose of personal and social transformation) of ordained and lay Christians. Clergy generally participate in education at the graduate level in which skills of critical thinking, brought to bear on texts, tradition and concrete human experiences hold a premium. Except in rare instances when lay Christians avail themselves of formal theological education, their primary encounter with theological education is in adult programs of Christian religious education in congregations, where often the goals of shoring up denominational orthodoxies or fostering devotional forms of piety take precedence over the development of critical theological thinking capacities in relation to faith.
This essay on children and trauma places a community-based, activist model of pastoral care into conversation with contemporary trauma theory to argue for the necessity of contextual strategies of care for traumatized children. Based upon ethnographic research in Ambon City in the southern Moluccas, a group of islands in Indonesia where violent fighting between Christian and Muslim groups dominated the landscape from 1999 to 2002, the study explores the impact of continual trauma on children. Western models of care coming out of a mental health perspective that privilege narrating the trauma experience become problematic in contexts such as this one, where access to mental health is limited and cultural norms work against the disclosure of painful events. Operating from intercultural pastoral care principles of context-based care that relies on local wisdom, the essay offers the example of Pastor Jacky Maniputty's community-based, activist model of pastoral care with youth as engaging the fundamental tasks of trauma healing in a culturally coherent manner.Keywords Trauma . Intercultural pastoral care . Indonesian religious conflict . ChildrenWe do not have the words in our various Indonesian languages for what you call 'trauma'. We do have plenty of experiences to fit the word. We have some other words that are not quite the same. Perhaps it means that for us, things that are traumatic are somehow unsayable culturally. So, we borrow this word from English and incorporate it into our languages because these days we must have some way to speak about the condition in which we find ourselves at this point in our history. Our young people today are children of trauma, even those who were not yet born in the time of the worst violence.-Yuli, Ambon, Indonesia Pastoral Psychol
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