Representing the Good: Pastoral Care in a Secular Age

Carmen Schuhmann,Annelieke Damen

doi:10.1007/s11089-018-0826-0

Abstract

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.

Highlights

In ‘a secular age’ (Taylor 2007), pastoral care is no longer exclusively associated with specific religious traditions and communities
As explained in the introduction, the challenge here is to come to an understanding of pastoral care that includes practitioners of different worldview traditions and that pictures pastoral care as relevant for people of Ball religions and none.^ Following the work of Taylor, we have developed a view of pastoral care as work in ‘moral space.’
As different health care professionals claim authority to provide this care, pastoral caregivers face the challenge of explaining the unique quality of the spiritual care that they provide

Summary

Human existence and the orientation metaphor

According to Murdoch (1970), developing an understanding of the human condition necessarily involves the use of metaphorical language, in particular metaphors of space, of movement, and of vision. 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). The way in which things appear to us and obtain prereflective meaning depends on our bodily orientation This suggests that orientation processes in moral space have a bodily dimension and that pastoral care, understood in terms of engaging with orientation processes, involves approaching people as corporeal as well as spiritual beings. We will argue that these ideas are helpful for theoretically underpinning the pastoral quality of pastoral care in a secular age

Murdoch on good and transcendence

Representing the good in practices of pastoral care

Brief recapitulation and concluding remarks