Spirituality and Personhood in Dementia
Spirituality and Personhood in Dementia

Author: Albert Jewell

Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers

Published: 2011-08-15

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 0857003526

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Positive shifts in attitudes mean that emphasis is now being placed on the person with dementia and their personal relationships, rather than the illness. There is also growing recognition of the significance of a person's spiritual life in forming an essential basis for their sense of identity, and in providing them with a resource for coping. Offering an inter-disciplinary approach to spirituality and personhood in dementia care, the contributors to this book are leading practitioners and researchers in the field. They provide both a theoretical structure and a practical understanding of the essential role that spirituality can play in the affirmation of personhood and identity, and of ways in which the spiritual well-being of people with dementia can be nurtured. This thought-provoking book includes chapters approaching the subject from Christian and Buddhist perspectives, discussion of inter-faith relations, and of what spirituality might mean for those not part of any faith tradition. This will be valuable reading for nurses, care workers, care commissioners and pastoral support professionals interested in a more holistic and contemplative approach to caring for people with dementia.

Spirituality and Personhood in Dementia
Spirituality and Personhood in Dementia

Author: Albert Jewell

Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1849051542

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Offering an inter-disciplinary approach to spirituality and personhood in dementia care, the contributors to this book are leading practitioners and researchers in the field. They provide both a theoretical structure and a practical understanding of the essential role that spirituality can play in the affirmation of personhood and identity.

Dementia
Dementia

Author: Julian C. Hughes

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 019856614X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This study juxtaposes philosophical analysis and clinical experience to present an overview of the issues surrounding dementia. It conveys a strong ethical message, arguing in favour of treating people with dementia with all the dignity they deserve as human beings.

Dementia
Dementia

Author: John Swinton

Publisher: SCM Press

Published: 2017-01-31

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0334049644

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Winner of the Michael Ramsay Prize 2016 Dementia is one of the most feared diseases in Western society today. Some have even gone so far as to suggest euthanasia as a solution to the perceived indignity of memory loss and the disorientation that accompanies it. Here, John Swinton develops a practical theology of dementia for caregivers, people with dementia, ministers, hospital chaplains, and medical practitioners as he explores two primary questions: • Who am I when I’ve forgotten who I am? • What does it mean to love God and be loved by God when I have forgotten who God is? Offering compassionate and carefully considered theological and pastoral responses to dementia and forgetfulness, Swinton’s Dementia redefines dementia in light of the transformative counter story that is the gospel.

Ministry with the Forgotten
Ministry with the Forgotten

Author: Bishop Kenneth L. Carder

Publisher: Abingdon Press

Published: 2019-09-17

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 150188025X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Dementia diseases represent a crisis of faith for many family members and congregations. Magnifying this crisis is the way people with dementia tend to be objectified by both medical and religious communities. They are recipients of treatment and projects for mission. Ministry is done to and for them rather than with them. While acknowledging the devastation of dementia diseases, Ken Carder draws on his own experience as a caregiver, hospice chaplain, and pastoral practitioner to portray the gifts as well as the challenges accompanying dementia diseases. He confronts the deep personal and theological questions created by loving people with dementia diseases, demonstrating how living with dementia can be a means of growing in faith, wholeness, and ministry for the entire community of faith. He also reveals that authentic faith transcends intellectual beliefs, verbal affirmations, and prescribed practices. Carder asserts that the Judeo-Christian tradition offers a broader lens, defining personhood in relationship to God’s story and humanity’s participation in God’s mighty acts of creation and new creation; thereby contributing to hope, community, and self-worth. Pastors and congregations will be better equipped to minister with people affected by dementia, receiving their gifts and responding to their unique needs. They will learn how people with dementia contribute to the community and the church’s life and mission, discovering practical ways those contributions can be identified, nurtured, and incorporated into the church’s life and ministry.

The Neurology of Religion
The Neurology of Religion

Author: Alasdair Coles

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019-11-07

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 1107082609

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Examines what can be learnt about the brain mechanisms underlying religious practice from studying people with neurological disorders.

On Vanishing
On Vanishing

Author: Lynn Casteel Harper

Publisher: Catapult

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 126

ISBN-13: 1948226294

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An essential book for those coping with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders that “reframe[s] our understanding of dementia with sensitivity and accuracy . . . to grant better futures to our loved ones and ourselves” (The New York Times). An estimated fifty million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer's erase parts of one's memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don't simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging, addressing not only the indignities caused by the condition but also by the rhetoric surrounding it. Harper asks essential questions about the nature of our outsized fear of dementia, the stigma this fear may create, and what it might mean for us all to try to “vanish well.” Weaving together personal stories with theology, history, philosophy, literature, and science, Harper confronts our elemental fears of disappearance and death, drawing on her own experiences with people with dementia both in the American healthcare system and within her own family. In the course of unpacking her own stories and encounters—of leading a prayer group on a dementia unit; of meeting individuals dismissed as “already gone” and finding them still possessed of complex, vital inner lives; of witnessing her grandfather’s final years with Alzheimer’s and discovering her own heightened genetic risk of succumbing to the disease—Harper engages in an exploration of dementia that is unlike anything written before on the subject. A rich and startling work of nonfiction, On Vanishing reveals cognitive change as it truly is, an essential aspect of what it means to be mortal.

The Moral Challenge of Alzheimer Disease
The Moral Challenge of Alzheimer Disease

Author: Stephen G. Post

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2002-11-04

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0801870151

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Society today, writes Stephen Post, is "hypercognitive": it places inordinate emphasis on people's powers of rational thinking and memory. Thus, Alzheimer disease and other dementias, which over an extended period incrementally rob patients of exactly those functions, raise many dilemmas. How are we to view—and value—persons deprived of what some consider the most important human capacities? In the second edition of The Moral Challenge of Alzheimer Disease, Post updates his highly praised account of the major ethical issues relating to dementia care. With chapters organized to follow the progression from mild to severe and then terminal stages of dementia, Post discusses topics including the experience of dementia, family caregiving, genetic testing for Alzheimer disease, quality of life, and assisted suicide and euthanasia. New to this edition are sections dealing with end-of-life issues (especially artificial nutrition and hydration), the emerging cognitive-enhancing drugs, distributive justice, spirituality, and hospice, as well as a critique of rationalistic definitions of personhood. The last chapter is a new summary of practical solutions useful to family members and professionals.

Forgetting Whose We are
Forgetting Whose We are

Author: David Keck

Publisher:

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 9780687020881

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Alzheimer's disease - a degenerative disease of the central nervous system characterized especially by premature mental deterioration - is the most publicly visible and widely discussed form of a range of disorders known as senile dementia. The nature of Alzheimer's disease, especially its progressive debilitation of the memory, raises key theological issues. What does it mean to be truly human? Does our ability to remember define who we are as persons? When the mind loses its ability to remember, what happens to the life of the soul? When we forget God, does God still remember us? Forgetting Whose We Are offers a Christian understanding of and response to the difficult theological, spiritual, and pastoral problems raised by Alzheimer's disease. Filling an important gap in existing literature by directly confronting the theological challenges of Alzheimer's disease to victims, caregivers, and their communities, the book affirms the classic Christian doctrines that witness to the reality of grace and the promises of salvation even for those who can no longer remember themselves, their families, or their relationship with God.

Viktor Frankl's Contribution to Spirituality and Aging
Viktor Frankl's Contribution to Spirituality and Aging

Author: Melvin A. Kimble

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-02-04

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1317825853

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Use Frankl's insights and techniques to improve life for your aging clients or parishioners. Viktor Frankl, a holocaust survivor who experienced firsthand the horrors of Auschwitz, saw man as “a being who continuously decides what he is: a being who equally harbors the potential to descend to the level of an animal or to ascend to the life of a saint. Man is that being, who, after all, invented the gas chambers; but at the same time he is that being who entered into those same gas chambers with his head held high and with the 'Our Father’or the Jewish prayer of the dying on his lips.”Dr. Frankl's insights led him to found the therapeutic system of logotherapy, which views man as a spiritual being rather than simply as a biological construct. Logotherapy has come to be called the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy (after Freud's psychoanalysis and Adler's individual psychology). He left a rich legacy of theory and insights especially relevant to the search for meaning in later life. The tenets of logotherapy provide many clues and approaches to what an ever-increasing body of evidence suggests regarding the crisis of aging as a crisis of meaning. Frankl’s insightful work increased man’s understanding of the spiritual dimension of humanity and the dignity and worth of every person in the face of what he called “the tragic trial of human existence: pain, guilt, and death.”Viktor Frankl's Contribution to Spirituality and Aging presents an essential overview of logotherapy and explores: the search for and the will to meaning in later life the connection between logotherapy and pastoral counselingbringing psychology and theology together to effectively counsel the aging the role of logotherapy in the treatment of adult major depression aspects of meaning and personhood in dementia the search for meaning in long-term care settings Viktor Frankl's Contribution to Spirituality and Aging represents varying professional perspectives on the application of Frankl's logotherapy for ministry with older adults. The chapter authors represent diverse professional backgrounds in medicine, pastoral theology, the behavioral sciences, and pastoral ministry. They address issues such as death and dying, dementia and depression, and the spiritual meaning of aging, as well as Frankl's conception of the nature of humanity. Everyone interested in the connection between theology and psychology in the context of the aging will want to own this book.