Believable Visions of the Good: an Exploration of the Role of Pastoral Counselors in Promoting Resilience

Schuhmann, Carmen; Geugten, Wendy van der

doi:10.1007/s11089-017-0759-z

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Human beings cannot but try to find their orientation in the space constituted by these questions. Processes of orienting in moral space are existential processes that may be understood as processes of searching for meaning in life (Schuhmann and van der Geugten 2017 ).…”

Section: Human Existence and The Orientation Metaphormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…People who face loss, illness, death, incarceration, or violence may feel that their sense of being close to or moving towards ‘the good’—towards a life worth living or a full life—is challenged or even shattered. They face existential questions that they cannot deal with and fail to experience a sense of meaning in life (Schuhmann and van der Geugten 2017 ). Sometimes they explicitly describe their situation in terms of disorientation: they don’t know where to go or how to go on, they feel lost, or they feel they are wandering in the dark.…”

Section: Human Existence and The Orientation Metaphormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…People who seek support from pastoral caregivers generally feel disoriented in a deep and unsettling way and do not easily or quickly manage to reorient. The central concern of pastoral caregivers may then be understood as supporting people’s search for (re)orientation in moral space (Schuhmann and van der Geugten 2017 ).…”

Section: Human Existence and The Orientation Metaphormentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In fact, pastoral caregivers do not take a preconceived notion of visions of the good that people orient towards as the fixed starting point of their practice. Work in moral space is work in the domain of meaning regarding which visions of the good are of fundamental value to someone, at this point in his or her life, given the circumstances (Schuhmann and van der Geugten 2017 ). Pastoral caregivers would not presume to know the answer to this question but sensitively and attentively support people in searching for and figuring out their own answers (Doehring 2015 ; Lynch 2002 ).…”

Section: The ‘Pastoral Quality’ Of Work In Moral Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In order to understand the distinctive role of pastoral caregivers, instead of attempting to identify characteristic pastoral goods that pastoral caregivers would support people orienting towards, we might also focus on the kind of situations in which the specific character of pastoral care most obviously comes to the fore. The role of pastoral caregivers is probably most salient in ‘ultimate’ situations—situations of severe disorientation in which our usual visions of the good lose their believability (Schuhmann and van der Geugten 2017 ). Ultimate situations may involve experiences of wonder or awe that do not fit in with our usual visions of the good and which render these visions of the good inadequate or irrelevant.…”

Section: The ‘Pastoral Quality’ Of Work In Moral Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

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Representing the Good: Pastoral Care in a Secular Age

Schuhmann

Damen

2018

Pastoral Psychol

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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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Section: Human Existence and The Orientation Metaphormentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Human Existence and The Orientation Metaphormentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Human Existence and The Orientation Metaphormentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The ‘Pastoral Quality’ Of Work In Moral Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The ‘Pastoral Quality’ Of Work In Moral Spacementioning

confidence: 99%

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Representing the Good: Pastoral Care in a Secular Age

Schuhmann

Damen

2018

Pastoral Psychol

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Not Only Coping: Resilience and Its Sources from a Thomistic Perspective

Roszak

2022

J Relig Health

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In describing the Christian moral ethos, Thomas Aquinas draws attention to the way in which adversities, trials or afflictions are overcome. This paper analyzes two types of resilience present in Aquinas’s thought as well as their sources and manifestations. The first type, moral resilience, is based on the virtue of fortitude, which governs human behavior in the face of great fear. With regard to the second type of resilience, the focus is on showing how grace contributes to increasing power through weakness. In the concluding section, there are also certain suggestions as to how resilience education could be developed.

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How Military Chaplains Strengthen the Moral Resilience of Soldiers and Veterans: Results From a Case Studies Project in the Netherlands

Schuhmann,

Pleizier,

Walton

et al. 2023

Pastoral Psychol

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In spiritual care research, studies on military chaplaincy are underrepresented, and most available studies center on moral injury. This article contributes to the existing literature on spiritual care in the military by presenting a study of 13 case descriptions of spiritual care provision by military chaplains from the Netherlands. These were analyzed using the framework method, a qualitative method of systematically searching for patterns in data sets, in order to answer the question: How do military chaplains contribute to the moral resilience of soldiers and veterans experiencing moral stress? The analytical framework was constructed on the basis of Doehring’s (Pastoral Psychology, 64(5), 635–649, 2015) conceptual understanding of moral resilience as the outcome of processes of spiritual integration of moral stress in caregiving relationships. This study shows that soldiers experience moral stress when core values associated with ‘being a soldier’ conflict with expectations or actions of soldiers themselves or of others, with the way the military organization functions, or with the spiritual notion of ‘being a good, loving and loveworthy human being’. In their responses to moral stress, chaplains contribute to moral resilience by engaging in co-creating spiritual orienting frameworks which accommodate a sense of goodness of self and others and allow for nuanced, biographically rooted moral views. Soldiers experience conversations and brief encounters with chaplains as relational ‘moments of goodness’, which may also contribute to moral resilience.

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Believable Visions of the Good: an Exploration of the Role of Pastoral Counselors in Promoting Resilience

Cited by 7 publications

References 35 publications

Representing the Good: Pastoral Care in a Secular Age

Representing the Good: Pastoral Care in a Secular Age

Not Only Coping: Resilience and Its Sources from a Thomistic Perspective

How Military Chaplains Strengthen the Moral Resilience of Soldiers and Veterans: Results From a Case Studies Project in the Netherlands

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