Fuller Theological Seminary is an ecumenical seminary in Pasadena, California, with regional campuses in the western United States. It is egalitarian in nature.Fuller consistently has a student body that comprises over 4,000 students from 90 countries and 110 denominations. There are over 41,000 alumni Fuller is broadly evangelical among faculty and student body. Some affirming to conservative evangelical views such as unlimited inerrancy while others hold liberal evangelical sentiments such as limited inerrancy which views the Bible as true on matters of salvation but contains error in its recording of history and science.
This paper explores whether white Americans experience moral distress or injury (VanderWeele et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1–11, 2025) by participating in the historical construction and maintenance of a white supremacist society. The authors suggest that witnessing or perpetrating racist incidents could potentially prove to be morally distressful or injurious. If so, we consider how white Americans might reconcile their race-based moral injury through embodied rituals of lament and through interrogating the causes of suffering. Doehring and Cowen (2025) propose a spiritually respectful process of lamentation for those experiencing spiritual struggles and moral distress arising from witnessing climate crises. They define moral distress and injury using VanderWeele et al.’s, Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1–11 (2025) moral trauma spectrum, which ranges from moral distress to moral injury across roles of witnessing, perpetrating, and being harmed. We review the literature on moral injury and then on racial trauma and find that the extant research on moral distress and injury and racial trauma seems to indicate the possibility of race-based moral distress and injury within white Americans. We then theorize white moral distress and injury, which serves as the paper’s argumentative hinge, before reviewing practices and principles for processing trauma that may successively inform a framework for addressing hypothetical white moral distress and injury. The conclusion addresses Christian pastoral implications and offers suggestions for further research.
Several challenges for Christian spiritual formation in our current context can be traced to unintended consequences of the Church Growth Movement—in particular, its emphasis on numerical growth as the primary metric of ministry health as well as its approach to cultivating this numeric growth through homogenous congregations designed to serve only one kind of people. In the years ahead, the spiritual formation movement needs to globalize to speak to and reflect the current and future distribution of Christians throughout the world. Last, in light of the ongoing global mental health crisis, it also needs to more robustly develop the interrelatedness of the spiritual life with the emotional life without replacing union with Christ with psychological well-being as the telos of the Christian faith.
ABSTRACTDeeply ingrained cultural beliefs shape how HIV is framed and stigmatized, particularly among rural minoritized communities such as the Yi-Nuosu of Liangshan, China. This parallel-convergent mixed-methods study investigated the sociocultural formation and determinants of HIV-related stigma among Yi-Nuosu minorities. We conducted qualitative interviews with 19 Yi-Nuosu participants to understand local beliefs about the HIV-illness course and perceptions of people living with HIV (PLWH). We then administered an online quantitative survey to Yi-Nuosu (n = 221) and Han-Chinese (majority group; n = 109) residents of Liangshan to examine the relationships between HIV etiology beliefs and HIV-related stigma. Qualitative results indicated that prevailing fear of "unclean blood" and its perceived threat to communal harmony and familial lineage perpetuated stigmatization and exclusion of PLWH. Quantitatively, endorsement of traditional spiritual explanations of HIV, attributions of HIV transmission to unhygienic practices and casual contact with PLWH were associated with higher levels of stigma towards PLWH for both groups. Collectively, these findings underscore the importance of HIV stigma-mitigation interventions that integrate biomedical and traditional belief frameworks that challenge fears of proximal engagement with PLWH and reify intra- and inter-familial support for PLWH - a core cultural value within Yi communities.
Recent research on mature alterity , or humbly engaging with others’ differentness, showed a negative relation with religiousness/spirituality. There were also mixed findings for the association between mature alterity and well-being. Using a sample ( N = 5,528; M age = 41.92; 55% male; 57% White) of graduating students at 151 North American institutions accredited by the Association of Theological Schools, we employed variable- and person-centered analyses to examine associations between religiousness/spirituality, mature alterity, and well-being. We found that greater religiousness/spirituality correlated with lower mature alterity. Greater religiousness/spirituality was associated with greater global well-being and lower social well-being. Consistent with the theoretically informed expectation based on the relational spirituality model, those higher in both religiousness/spirituality and mature alterity showed higher well-being. These findings call for seminary leadership to practice theoretically informed judicious assessment of their students’ educational experience. Such an approach to assessment may elucidate possible entry points for targeted intervention to mitigate against reduced well-being, which was evident among some of the seminarians in our sample.
