Challenging Invisibility Practices Of Care

Have you made a New Year's resolution to get married out of nowhere? Did it work? When the author turned thirty, she put getting married on her New Year's resolution list, not because she wanted to get married or had a boyfriend but because of social pressure in which she lived. Social pressure made her think that if she wanted to ever get married, it was better to do so sooner than later. For three consecutive years, she prayed about it and made efforts to form relationships. After three years passed by, she was still single and unhappy. As she reflected on her unhappiness, she finally realized that she was not happy because she was not able to accomplish a goal that was ultimately out of her control. "How absurd it was to put 'get married' on my New Year's resolution!?" As she eliminated marriage from her New Year's resolutions and focused on what she really wanted to do with her life, her energy level was boosted. Although she did not have any tool to frame her singleness, she happened to choose the best course for her. Only if she knew the socially constructed characteristics of marriage, the first three years of her thirties would have been different. The author hopes ministers and never-married single women can learn what we think is normal is a very contextual product. The author invites never-married single women to own their own stories instead of being owned by metanarratives in their lives.

Today, many churches and their related agencies and ministries are shrinking. Often a large portion of those who remain are older adults. Celebrating the Graying Church suggests that this is an opportunity for a new and different kind of ministry—a ministry to, with, and from older adults who may have wisdom to pass on to the legacy of the future generations. This book offers opportunities, ideas, and guidance for this new vision and practice of ministry, while also describing how aging adults in ministry can support each other and their faith communities.

Living Well and Dying Faithfully explores how Christian practices — love, prayer, lament, compassion, and so on — can contribute to the process of dying well. Working on the premise that one dies the way one lives, the book is unique in its constructive dialogue between theology and medicine as offering two complementary modes of care.

The study of lived religion is an enterprise which attempts to elucidate how 'ordinary' men and women in all times and places draw on religious behavior, media, and meanings to make sense of themselves and their world. Through the influence of liberation theology and postmodernism, pastoral theologians_like other scholars of religion_have begun more closely to examine the particularity of religious practice that is reflected through the rubric of lived religion. Pastoral Bearings offers up ten studies that exemplify the usefulness of the lived religion paradigm to the field of pastoral theology. The volume presents detailed qualitative research focused on the everyday beliefs and practices of individuals and groups and explores the implications of lived religion for interdisciplinary conversation, intercultural and gender analysis, and congregational studies. Reflecting upon the utility of this approach for pastoral theological research, education, and pastoral care, the studies collected in Pastoral Bearings demonstrate the importance of the study of lived religion.

Injustice and the Care of Souls, Second Edition, explores injustices in church and society and their impact on pastoral caregiving. The book offers pastoral and spiritual caregivers broader contexts, knowledge, and skills to respond effectively to marginalized people and to reflect on how their own social locations affect their work.

In the fields of pastoral care and pastoral theology, there are times when a book signals a paradigm shift. This is one such book. LaMothe develops a political pastoral theology that is used to examine critically political, economic, and societal structures and practices. In the first part of the book, LaMothe argues that care and pastoral care are political concepts, which, along with the notion of justice, can be used as a hermeneutical framework to assess macropolitical and macroeconomic realities. Included in this section is the notion of civil and redemptive discourse, necessary for the survival and flourishing of persons and polis. The last section of the book examines U.S. Empire, capitalism, class, classism, and other pressing political issues using the hermeneutical lens of care.

This book explores the growing awareness, brought on by the recent explosion of communication technology, that all human beings are citizens of the world. Ryan LaMothe argues that this awareness comes with an urgent need to address political issues, systems, and structures at local, state, and international levels that harm human beings and our one habitat. Through the lens of pastoral theology, LaMothe analyzes the concepts of care, faith, power, and community as they are related to addressing local and global problems linked to neoliberal capitalism, racism and classism.