"This editorial work challenges us to move beyond individualistic, white, Western, middle-class models of pastoral care. With different authors drawing from the unique contexts of their own experiences, this book offers an insightful paradigm of communal pastoral and spiritual care in various intersectional contexts such as gender, race, class, culture, religion, sexuality, and nationality. This is an invaluable resource for intercultural pastoral care for those who attend to the needs of people as they deal with systems of oppression, injustice, and traumatic stress every day."
Injustice and the Care of Souls, Second Edition: Taking Oppression Seriously in Pastoral Care
The practice of pastoral care cannot escape the realities of injustices and oppression that often operate in the context where caregiving happens. In response, Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook and Karen B. Montagno present a compilation of essays that reach beyond individualistic, white, Western, middle-class models of caregiving that can mimic systems of injustice. Instead, the resulting volume offers constructive approaches to caregiving that more effectively meet the needs of those who routinely experience marginalization and oppression.
Kujawa-Holbrook and Montagno argue that the fundamental work of religious traditions, including caregiving, is about human freedom and wholeness. As such, Injustice and the Care of Souls helps chaplains, pastoral counselors, social service workers, and other caregivers to better situate their work within the contexts of those seeking care. The book also helps caregivers to reflect on ways their social locations affect their work.
Since its first publication nearly fifteen years ago, this book uniquely offered content that situated contexts such as substructures in urban neighborhoods, religious liturgical practices, and the impact of public policies as the focus for examining critical dynamics surrounding those seeking care, the caregiver, and the hope for oppression-sensitive forms of pastoral care. This second edition revises and reorganizes previous essays while providing additional ones. New chapters include ones that highlight the dead time of prison life, the impact of moral decision-making on veterans, and the life-or-death challenges that immigrants and refugees often face.
Kujawa-Holbrook and Montagno divide this edition's twenty-seven essays into five parts, with the first part devoted to the pastoral caregiver's positionality. The remaining sections address pastoral caregiving as embodied practices, cultural fluency and intersectional awareness, pastoral practice across the life span, and pastoral practice and public witness. This volume's contributors offer spiritual caregivers a compilation of approaches to the care of souls that bring healing, voice, and wholeness to the marginalized and oppressed.
- Publisher Fortress Press
- Format Paperback
- ISBN 9781506482477
- eBook ISBN 9781506482484
- Dimensions 6 x 9
- Pages 414
- Publication Date September 12, 2023
Endorsements
Rev. AHyun Lee, assistant professor of pastoral theology, care, and psychotherapy, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
"In this second edition of Injustice and the Care of Souls: Taking Oppression Seriously in Pastoral Care, Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook and Karen B. Montagno again make a significant contribution to pastoral care. Time has confirmed what the first publication argued--context and particularity matter. The model of pastoral care that reified the individual and gave scant attention to those relegated to the margins and subjected to the capricious effects of systemic injustice is fading, thanks to Kujawa-Holbrook and Montagno and their collaborators. The new chapters are timely and thought-provoking. The collection is deeply pastoral and, like the first edition, challenges the novice and most experienced to think theologically, pastorally, and systemically. A classic."
Phillis Isabella Sheppard, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter chair and Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture; interim associate dean for academic affairs; and director of the James Lawson Institute for the Research and Study of Nonviolent Movements, Vanderbilt University, and author of Tilling Sacred Grounds: Interiority, Black Women, and Religious Experience
"Struggle, pain, hardship, and loss are inevitable facets of the human condition. Yet, the extent to which we suffer is not simply an individual matter. Systems of oppression, inequality, and marginalization add often unrecognized layers of trauma and grief. This rich anthology of essays from diverse cultural, philosophical, and religious perspectives guides the twenty-first-century chaplain from assumptions to awareness, from stereotypes to cultural competence, and toward the important work of caring for all people."
Cantor Jonathan L. Friedmann, PhD, dean of the master of Jewish studies program, Academy for Jewish Religion California, and coeditor of Torah, Service, Deeds: Jewish Ethics in Transdenominational Perspectives
"Injustice and the Care of Souls exemplifies an embodied public theology in its oppression-sensitive and anti-racist approach to spiritual and pastoral care. Kujawa-Holbrook and Montagno midwife a text with an impressive community of voices that calls for an embodied practice that is accountable both to diverse traditions and to the emergent needs of marginalized communities. An invaluable conversation partner for all those engaged in ministries of care."
Storm Swain, Frederick Houk Borsch Associate Professor of Anglican Studies, Pastoral Care, and Theology, United Lutheran Seminary, and author of Trauma and Transformation at Ground Zero: A Pastoral Theology
"Pastoral care classic renewed. There is not pastoral care without the facing of injustices, truth-speaking, and reparation. Whether your care-full ministry is in the context of a congregation, chaplaincy, or broader community, this volume is an invitation and a nourishment for the faithful journey of providing effective and sustainable pastoral care."
Rev. Dr. Zachary Moon, professor of theology and psychology, Chicago Theological Seminary
"An indispensable resource for pastoral care classes. Injustice and the Care of Souls expands our understanding of pastoral care to include how caring ministry may be carried out in the face of intersecting forms of social oppression."
Kyungsig Samuel Lee, Edna and Lowell Craig Professor of Practical Theology, Spiritual Care, and Counseling, Claremont School of Theology, and coeditor of Justice Matters: Spiritual Care and Pastoral Theological Imaginations in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic
"Kujawa-Holbrook and Montagno are at it again, offering a revision I realize I have been waiting for. Faithful to their original motivating quest to resource 'pastoral care as if oppression matters,' this thoroughly revised and reorganized second edition expands the diversities of issues, identities, and intersections of pastoral care today. Activists, pastors, and professors need Kujawa-Holbrook and Montagno's edited book to inform spiritual care practices in situations always affected by oppressive structures that continue to perpetuate harm from generation to generation. The authors make a compelling case for and show how to practice care that attends to liberation and transformation toward thriving together. This is pastoral care that is real about just how much oppression matters and is a book needed urgently in a grieving, aching world with layers of unhealed wounds while bursting in possibilities and practices of new life. I will be assigning this edition in my pastoral care classes."
Mindy McGarrah Sharp, associate professor of practical theology and pastoral care, Columbia Theological Seminary, and author of Misunderstanding Stories and Creating Resistances
"This new edition of Injustice and the Care of Souls significantly updates and expands the first edition, offering a fuller conception of what it means to care in contexts of social injustice. Beginning with a strong account of the harm that white supremacy has wrought, the authors in this collection describe situations of people in diverse communities facing marginalization, discrimination, injustice, and/or violence. These essays offer sensitive insight and practical guidelines for caring responses across religious, racial, and cultural barriers. Fittingly, the final essays highlight the role of public witness and activism as vital elements of pastoral practice. This book is an indispensable resource for students of spiritual care, chaplains, religious leaders, and scholars."
Mary Clark Moschella, Roger J. Squire Professor of Pastoral Care, Yale Divinity School
"In a world where ministers confront myriad contexts of suffering, this book is an essential contribution to pastoral care. Students, pastoral ministers, and teachers will benefit from the depth and breadth of diverse experience and scholarship provided by the authors in this second edition."
Ryan LaMothe, professor of pastoral care and counseling, Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology, and author of A Radical Political Theology for the Anthropocene Era
"Injustice and Care for the Soul is a powerful and timely resource that meets a moment of reckoning within the field as national pastoral and spiritual care bodies strive to become anti-racist, anti-bias, and social justice organizations. This book, by a wide diversity of authors who write with self-reflective awareness of their intersectional social locations, beautifully envisions pastoral care as gardening. The pastoral gardener lovingly tends to the well-being of each individual plant. At the same time, they know that when the soil has become toxic due to oppressive systems, they need to work toward radically changing the environment, or the garden and each plant will continue to suffer. This book is pastoral and spiritual rather than merely psychological or sociological by also acknowledging that the blooming of each plant ultimately is brought about by a transcendent or spiritual reality larger than ourselves that the wisdom traditions know by many names or by the emptiness of no name at all."
Rev. Jurgen Schwing, ACPE certified educator, core faculty, The Chaplaincy Institute: An Interfaith Seminary and Community
"I welcome this revised second edition of Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook and Karen B. Montagno's excellent anthology Injustice and the Care of Souls. Incorporating new essays and updating the first edition, this volume again brings voices of the marginalized into the spotlight for pastoral care and shines a light on ways in which traditional, white, Western modes of caregiving, however well-intentioned, can also reinforce and collude with oppressive systems. An important and potentially eye-opening read for religious leaders and all those who provide pastoral and spiritual care."
Pamela Cooper-White, Christiane Brooks Johnson Professor of Psychology and Religion, Union Theological Seminary, New York, and author of Gender, Violence, and Justice
"The value and importance of this groundbreaking collection has only increased since its first edition. Stellar essays by inside experts cover an expanded number of contexts and provide concrete steps to advocate for those facing adversity amid ongoing inequity, intolerance, and harm. An absolutely essential guide for today's caregiver and for all those who care."
Bonnie Miller-McLemore, E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Chair and Professor of Religion, Psychology, and Culture, emerita, Vanderbilt University