Neuroplasticity, Performativity, and Clergy Wellness
Neuroplasticity, Performativity, and Clergy Wellness

Author: William D. Roozeboom

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2016-12-24

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1498521282

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This book invites readers, particularly clergy members, to rethink their understandings of the human person in light of recent developments in neuroscience. In addition to bringing together religion and neuroscience, it engages narrative theory, exercise physiology, and constructions of wellness to raise crucial questions about human identity and relationality and argue for a model of care that connects self-care and care for/with others. Furthermore, it claims that human beings are whole, intra/inter-relational, dynamic, plastic, and performative agents who have the capacity to story themselves neurophysiologically (in both “top-down” and “bottom-up” ways) through their regular practices of wellness.

Neuroplasticity, Performativity, and Clergy Wellness
Neuroplasticity, Performativity, and Clergy Wellness

Author: William D. Roozeboom

Publisher: Emerging Perspectives in Pastoral Theology and Care

Published: 2016-12-15

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781498521277

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Issues of clergy health and well-being are physical issues but also have social and theological dimensions. This book engages in interdisciplinary reconsideration of theological anthropology in light of the plasticity and performative quality of the embodied brain ecosystem, a...

Pastoral Care in the Anthropocene Age
Pastoral Care in the Anthropocene Age

Author: Ryan LaMothe

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-11-21

Total Pages: 227

ISBN-13: 179364148X

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This book considers the challenges and opportunities of the Anthropocene Age from the perspective of pastoral theology/care. The fundamental question and concern with regard to the Anthropocene Age for human beings and other species is, how are we to dwell together on this one earth. Care, LaMothe argues, is the central concept in answering this question. Effective care requires pastoral theologians to make use of multiple interpretive frameworks (e.g., theology, philosophy, human sciences, etc.) in the analytic pursuit of understanding and responding effectively to the realities of climate change. At the same time, it is also important for pastoral theologians to examine critically the theologies and philosophies that give rise to and impede pastoral interventions and, in the case of the Anthropocene Age, to be clear about how theologies and philosophies have contributed to ideologies that undergird both exploitation of the earth and other-than-human beings, while also contributing to climate change and obstructing climate action. These are necessary steps in developing pastoral responses aimed at caring for persons, communities, and other-than-human beings in need of a viable dwelling.

Christianity, LGBTQ Suicide, and the Souls of Queer Folk
Christianity, LGBTQ Suicide, and the Souls of Queer Folk

Author: Cody J. Sanders

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-05-15

Total Pages: 153

ISBN-13: 1793606102

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While garnering the attention of professionals across disciplines, from medicine to public health to psychology, and frequently covered as a topic of public concern in the news media, the elevated occurrence of suicide attempts among LGBTQ persons has received little attention within the literature of theology and religious studies. This book fills that lacuna by addressing the role that religious, spiritual, and theological narratives play in shaping the souls of queer folk. Taking a narrative approach to qualitative interview material from LGBTQ individuals who survived their suicide attempts, Cody J. Sanders argues that theological narratives can operate violently upon the souls of LGBTQ people in ways that make life precarious and, at time, seem unlivable. The book critically addresses the violence of theological narratives upon queer souls, filling a crucial void in scholarship concerning the role of religion—specifically Christianity—in LGBTQ suicide. Ultimately, the author draws upon the interview material to move readers toward constructive methods of contributing to the resistance and resilience of queer souls in relation to soul violence, asking how we can intervene with practices of care in order to cultivate livability of life for queer people.

Pastoral Virtues for Artificial Intelligence
Pastoral Virtues for Artificial Intelligence

Author: Jaco J. Hamman

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-10-03

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1793640467

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Pastoral Virtues for Artificial Intelligence (AI) acknowledges that human destiny is intimately tied to artificial intelligence. AI already outperforms a person on most tasks. Our ever-deepening relationship with an AI that is increasingly autonomous mirrors our relationship to what is perceived as Sacred or Divine. Like God, AI awakens hope and fear in people, while giving life to some and taking livelihood, especially in the form of jobs, from others. AI, built around values of convenience, productivity, speed, efficiency, and cost reduction, serve humanity poorly, especially in moments that demand care and wisdom. This book explores the pastoral virtues of hope, patience, play, wisdom, and compassion as foundational to personal flourishing, communal thriving, and building a robust AI. Biases of determinism, speed, objectivity, ignorance, and apathy within AI's algorithms are identified. These biases can be minimized through the incorporation of pastoral virtues as values guiding AI.

Women Leaving Prison
Women Leaving Prison

Author: Jill L. Snodgrass

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2018-11-16

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 1498544037

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Women Leaving Prison examines the oft-ignored experiences of female returning citizens, our returning sisters, who face numerous individual and systemic barriers as they return to life beyond bars. In the age of mass incarceration, with 700,000 inmates leaving prison each year, spiritual and religious support during reentry is a crucial component of prison ministry. Women Leaving Prison describes women’s pathways to prison, their spiritual and religious experiences inside, and then utilizes interpretative phenomenological analysis, a qualitative research method, to uncover the spiritual and religious beliefs and practices of returning sisters. The findings from the qualitative study then ground the book’s call for a revised prison ministry praxis, entitled Project Sister Connect, that details how churches, as well as concerned citizens and people of faith, can welcome and care for returning sisters. Project Sister Connect offers a model for facilitating female returning citizens’ successful reentry via communal and individual spiritual care and support and by working toward the eradication of structural injustices.

Tilling Sacred Grounds
Tilling Sacred Grounds

Author: Phillis Isabella Sheppard

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-03-21

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1793638632

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Tilling Sacred Grounds examines Black women’s interiority and negotiation of race, gender, and sexuality in religious spaces and religious practices. Phillis Isabella Sheppard argues for the importance of the exchange between interiority and public spaces, and examines religion in cyberspace, art, ritual, and street ministry. She refigures the location of religious experience by retrieving Black women’s interiority as religious space. Often excluded from Black religious studies, interiority is necessary for understanding Black women’s complex and even unconscious relationship with religion. The book weaves a thread by stressing that interiority has subjective, intersubjective, conscious, unconscious, and relational dimensions formed in historical, and social contexts.

Pastoral and Spiritual Care in a Digital Age
Pastoral and Spiritual Care in a Digital Age

Author: Kirk A. Bingaman

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2020-07-06

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 1498553427

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing what it means to be human. Given our increasing merger with machines, we have therefore entered uncharted territory and an era of unprecedented change. For pastoral and spiritual care providers, religious faith communities, clinical practitioners, and educators, immediate theological reflection is needed, focusing on the potential existential threat and opportunity, and what will constitute human personhood in an age of technological enhancement. Preserving our humanity in a digital age will require intentional focus on strengthening the neural circuitry associated with focused attention, mindful and compassionate awareness, and social and relational intelligence, even as we put to good use the emerging digital technologies.

Before Belief
Before Belief

Author: Bruce A. Stevens

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-01-15

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1793607222

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First things are spiritually and theologically important. Before Belief explores the precognitive human experience of transcendence, illuminating how such foundational experiences are formative of attachment relationships with people and ultimately with God. The book proposes an implicit learning model rather than rely on Freud’s or Jung’s understanding of the unconscious, with a goal of recovering unconscious spiritual learning. Once discovered and put into language, early learning needs to be tested and integrated into life experience and expressed in committed living. The theories examined and advanced in the work are also carried through in practical case studies that demonstrate the pastoral and clinical salience of understanding and connecting people to those grounding experiences.

The Chaplain's Presence and Medical Power
The Chaplain's Presence and Medical Power

Author: Richard Coble

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2017-12-20

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1498559123

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Why is loss present but rarely spoken of in the hospital system? How does such silence carry over to the practices of chaplains who accompany dying patients and grieving families? Richard Coble critically examines his experiences as a hospital chaplain to analyze the place of spiritual care in wider trends vexing healthcare today, including its persistent disparities and its related inability to reckon with human decline. Simultaneously, he offers routes for chaplains to be a force of change.