This article examines Military Soul Care as practiced within the Swedish Armed Forces, where it constitutes a distinct and culturally embedded form of military chaplaincy structured through the ACCES framework. The aim is to describe how Swedish military chaplains (MCs) interpret the importance attributed to Military Soul Care by commanders and other military personnel, and how they perceive its use within military practice. The study is based on a qualitative survey conducted in March 2025 among 50 MCs. The material was analyzed using inductive and abductive thematic analysis. The results show that Military Soul Care is generally regarded as highly important, particularly in situations involving crisis, injury, and death. The most frequently requested aspect concerns soul care conversations, which enable military personnel to address moral, ethical, and existential questions outside the chain of command. Support related to death, grief, and crisis, as well as ceremonies and rituals, is also consistently requested. By contrast, advisory and educational functions are utilized less consistently. Overall, the findings indicate that although Military Soul Care is widely valued, its full professional potential is not always fully operationalized within military practice. Nevertheless, the study suggests that MCs primarily draw upon their priestly competencies in the tasks most frequently requested, especially in situations involving crisis, death, and memorial ceremonies. Through culturally rooted rituals and traditions, they care for the souls of military personnel and fulfill the overall purpose of Military Soul Care within the Swedish Armed Forces.
Pastoral caregivers regularly encounter persons who are distressed not only by what they think but also by what they believe their thoughts mean. In behavioral health units, palliative care rooms, trauma hospitals, churches, prisons, campuses, and family systems, intrusive thoughts, repetitive worries, unwanted images, angry fantasies, religious doubts, and self-condemning interpretations may be experienced as spiritual failure, demonic attack, divine abandonment, or evidence of weak faith. Written from the perspective of a chaplain formed by behavioral health, palliative care and hospice, and acute hospital practice, this article proposes a pastoral-theological framework for helping care-seekers relate to their thoughts before they harden into consent, shame, or compulsive rumination. Drawing on Evagrius Ponticus’s account of the logismoi—thoughts or patterns of reasoning, particularly harmful or misleading ones—and nepsis—mental and spiritual alertness, clear-headedness, and self-control—and placing these concepts in limited conversation with metacognitive theory, the article argues that pastoral care should attend not only to thought content but also to the care-seeker’s relationship to thinking itself. Two composite pastoral examples, one from a behavioral health unit and one from palliative care, illustrate how thought distress can be met without panic, moralism, or therapeutic overreach. The author-developed WATCH framework invites pastoral caregivers to Welcome without alarm, Attend to the thought as a thought, Trace what the thought is doing, Choose an appropriate pastoral response, and Help further when needed.
This article draws from an address delivered in Dallas in March of 2026 to the plenary gathering of the College of Pastoral Supervision and Psychotherapy, a professional society of clinical pastoral educators and psychotherapists. It explores contours of an unpublished report by Henri J. M. Nouwen of a visit with Anton T. Boisen in August of 1964 and considers implications for boys and men who are unable to speak of and grieve their disowned gender identities, sexual desires, and transformational experiences.
This article develops a cautious theoretical comparison between psychoanalytic accounts of unconscious process, religious and philosophical traditions concerned with hiddenness, and contemporary quantum-like approaches in psychology. It does not argue that the unconscious is literally quantum mechanical, nor that religious traditions anticipated modern physics. Its more modest claim is that these domains converge around a shared difficulty of representation: how to think about phenomena that are consequential in experience yet become available only through particular conditions of observation, symbolisation, relationship, and interpretation. The discussion distinguishes analogical and formal uses of quantum ideas from stronger ontological claims about quantum physical causation in the brain and defines the quantum terms most relevant to the argument. It then considers unconscious process as a mode of potentiality whose meanings appear indirectly through dreams, symptoms, affective configurations, transference, and enactment. Bohr’s complementarity, quantum cognition, and quantum-like modelling are used as bounded resources for thinking about contextuality, indeterminacy, and the movement from latent possibility to determinate expression. The argument is extended through William James, apophatic theology, Whiteheadian process thought, Barad, Keller, Gargiulo, and the Jung-Pauli material. The clinical and pastoral implication is not that uncertainty should be romanticised but that care often requires disciplined negative capability – the capacity to remain with symbolic, affective, and spiritual meanings before reducing them to doctrine, pathology, or mechanism. The article proposes a bounded interdisciplinary language for pastoral psychology, able to recognise hiddenness, emergence, truth registers, and relational meaning without collapsing psychology, religion, and physics into a single explanatory system.
Classic theories of religious conversion have largely framed the process as a spiritual transition centered on meaning-making and individual psychological change. In contrast, scholarship on conversion from high-cost religious groups—defined by costly membership and costly exit—suggests that leaving such communities is often accompanied by fractured family relationships and loss of belonging. However, much of this literature is grounded in WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) contexts where individual autonomy is emphasized. In predominantly religious non-WEIRD settings such as the Philippines, social relationships may be more central to conversion processes. This study explores the conversion narratives of four Filipino adults who left high-cost religious groups. Using thematic narrative analysis, we examined participants’ narratives to identify the critical events leading to what the participants perceived as successful conversion. Three interrelated themes traced this movement: the turn from given faith to chosen departure, the relational conditions of departure, and the family conditions of successful conversion. Despite its small sample size, the study contributes a relationally grounded account of religious conversion, demonstrating that family relationships can trigger, shape, and anchor religious conversion trajectories in collectivist contexts.
In the history of pastoral and spiritual care education, there has long been an emphasis on aspects of presence, theological reflection, and formation as practices of care. At the same time, some educators and practitioners continue to reimagine training methods that connect knowledge of care to the responsive enactment of care across diverse pastoral and spiritual care contexts. As a framework, deliberate practice draws on Ericsson’s (2017, 2018) research, which examines how expertise develops through a specific process of practice and corrective feedback, as well as Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development (Podolskiy, 2012), which allows skills to be learned in an iterative, formative manner. The framework can help translate pastoral and spiritual care competencies into skills without reducing care to mere techniques, while preserving its theological, relational, ethical, and formative dimensions. After reviewing the existing literature on pastoral and spiritual care training methods, the article considers how deliberate practice may contribute to skill acquisition in these areas while preserving the theological, relational, ethical, and formative character of care. An example focused on exploring the metaphors of care seekers is provided to demonstrate how deliberate practice can be adapted for pastoral and spiritual caregivers-in-training.
This research paper explores the concepts of spiritual intelligence and ethical consciousness through a comparative literary study of the Bhagavad Gita and 19th-century American transcendentalist writings, particularly those of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The Bhagavad Gita presents an ethical-spiritual framework centered on self-realization, moral duty (dharma), and detached action (nishkāma karma). American transcendentalism similarly emphasizes intuition, self-reliance, moral autonomy, and the unity of the individual soul with the universal spirit. Using qualitative textual and comparative literary methodologies, this paper suggests the convergence of Eastern and Western spiritual philosophies in cultivating ethical consciousness. The study argues that these texts contribute to ethical reflection through concepts such as detached action, self-reliance, moral discipline, and spiritual awareness, demonstrating their continuing relevance within contemporary ethical and educational discourse.
This article examines the application of religiously integrated cognitive behavioral therapy (RCBT) for enhancing Christian vicarious secondary control (CVSC). CVSC and its associated measurement instrument, the Christian Vicarious Secondary Control Scale (CVSCS), are derived from the conceptual framework of Christian secondary control associated with a scale developed by Lai and Lee (2025). This study briefly outlines a foundation for incorporating CVSC and CVSCS into RCBT. Rather than presenting a treatment protocol, this commentary highlights particular basic and essential interventions that are commonly found in RCBT manuals, i.e., the assessment and identification of unhelpful thoughts and their subsequent replacement with biblical teachings, which is germane to the enhancement of CVSC. Additionally, the expected positive therapeutic outcomes for incorporating CVSC and CVSCS into RCBT are discussed. [Here is the end of Abstract and hence the following should be the 1st paragraph of the manuscript. Thus, the keywords should be put here.]Christian vicarious secondary control (CVSC) is derived from the conceptual framework of Christian secondary control developed by Lai and Lee (2025) for explaining the coping strategies that Christians exercise in the face of life adversity. Thus, a Christian secondary control scale has been constructed (Lai Lee, 2025) for this study. According to Lai and Lee (2025), both the conceptual framework and scale have therapeutic implications that are potentially beneficial for the further integration of Christian faith into psychotherapy. In this commentary, the therapeutic application of CVSC is discussed in terms of religiously integrated cognitive behavioral therapy (RCBT). However, rather than presenting a treatment protocol, this paper highlights certain basic and essential interventions commonly found in RCBT manuals, i.e., the assessment and identification of unhelpful thoughts and their subsequent replacement with biblical teachings (e.g., de Abreu Costa Moreira-Almeida, 2022; Pearce et al., 2015; Ramos et al., 2018), which is germane to the enhancement of CVSC.[The following keywords should be moved up and placed after the Abstract]
This study examined the risk of burnout among Catholic priests as a function of the frequency of divine office prayer and of pastoral visits to the bishop. Using information from the Association of Religion Data Archives, data on prayer frequency, visits to the bishop, working hours, confessions heard, and the number of parish assignments were collected for 465 American priests. A measure of burnout risk was constructed from the last three variables and used to assess occupational stress. Factor analysis was used to determine the underlying correlational structure of the variables contributing to burnout risk. ANCOVA, with age as the covariate, was used to assess the effects of prayer and visits to the bishop on the risk of burnout. Results showed that age was a significant factor in the risk of burnout. While other variables did not reach statistical significance, a pattern of increased prayer with occupational stress was observed. The possibility that priests respond to stress through a stronger commitment to prayer is discussed. The findings suggest that overly simplistic models of the connection between spiritual practice and burnout may not fully capture the reality of how priests respond to job stress and the role that prayer plays in it.
This study investigates how survivors described discovering ways to reorient themselves after experiencing loss related to perceived spiritual abuse within certain Pentecostal fellowships in Norway. Through a reorientation of significance, they sought value and meaning in their lives and aimed to improve their well-being. They did this by strengthening their agency associated with taking responsibility for their situation after they left a context of perceived spiritual abuse. Semi-structured interviews with 16 participants were conducted and analyzed using a reflexive thematic analysis. The participants reflected on their past experiences and how these continued to affect them as they evaluated their life and planned for their future. The analysis identified two main empirical themes: (1) loss-oriented reflections on the past and (2) gain-oriented reflections on the present and the future in light of the imprint of losses in the past. The discussion of the participants’ reorientation of significance applies the theoretical lens of power dynamics and incorporates Kenneth Pargament’s ideas about orienting systems and sense of significance alongside Roy Kearsley’s distinction between power over, power from, and power to.
The neuroscience of religion—often, though not without controversy, referred to as neurotheology—investigates how religious, spiritual, and contemplative experiences are embodied in neural, cognitive, affective, and autonomic processes. The present focused review narrows its scope to functional neuroimaging and electrophysiological studies of prayer, meditation, mystical experience, and personally meaningful spiritual experience. It does not attempt to reduce faith or theology to brain activity; rather, it evaluates what positron emission tomography (PET), single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), electroencephalography (EEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can and cannot show about the neural correlates of such experiences. The present article therefore distinguishes three analytical levels: spirituality as a personal or experiential orientation toward transcendence, religion as a culturally and institutionally mediated system of beliefs and practices, and theology as a normative and conceptual reflection on divine reality, revelation, doctrine, and religious meaning. Evidence from PET, SPECT, EEG, and fMRI is discussed as complementary rather than interchangeable: PET and SPECT provide hemodynamic or metabolic information, EEG captures fast oscillatory dynamics, and fMRI offers higher spatial resolution for distributed networks. The review highlights convergent findings involving frontoparietal, limbic, salience, and default mode–related systems while also emphasizing methodological limits, theological caution, and the need for a dialogical rather than reductionist interpretation of neuroimaging data.
Questions about why disability occurs often arise in the context of a prenatal diagnosis. Pastors are frequently called upon to offer theological interpretation and pastoral care in response to such questions. Yet, little is known about how they understand the causes of disability and the ways these beliefs might shape their responses. In this qualitative study, we examined how 25 pastors responded to questions about God’s role in causing disability using a vignette involving a couple who received a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. The pastors’ responses reflected four primary patterns: rejecting divine causation, emphasizing God’s permission, affirming disability as part of the divine design, or reframing such questions as unhelpful or unanswerable. We discuss implications for pastoral counseling and future research aimed at equipping faith leaders to support families encountering genetic disability for the first time.
Suicide remains a critical global mental health challenge, disproportionately affecting low- and middle-income countries where access to formal mental health services is limited. In such contexts, including sub-Saharan Africa, individuals in crisis often turn first to faith leaders. Clergy frequently encounter suicidal crises and serve as initial points of contact, yet there is little empirical evidence on their comfort or competence in responding to such crises. Our study examined clergy’s self-reported comfort and competence in handling suicidal crises, thereby addressing a critical gap in understanding clergy’s readiness for frontline suicide prevention in Nigeria. Participants were 253 Catholic clergy (all Black men; ages 27–72, M = 44.58, SD = 9.95) who completed a questionnaire form during monthly recollections and annual retreats for priests in eight Nigerian dioceses between June and October 2024. All participants reported having intervened in cases of suicidal thoughts or attempts. An ordinal logistic regression was applied for the data analysis. Findings indicated that roughly 40
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly entering pastoral care contexts. Despite its genuine promise, it has drawn substantial criticism—chief among them the charge that AI “lacks the human” and therefore should not be used in pastoral care. Yet what “the human” means here is rarely specified. This article interrogates that claim. Drawing on current debates, we reconstruct four candidate interpretations of “the human”: (1) emotional capacity and empathy, (2) corporeality and embodiment, (3) authenticity and spontaneity, and (4) soul and likeness to God. We examine each in context and show that, rather than establishing that AI is incapable of pastoral care, these notions are better read as reflections of users’ needs. By disentangling these meanings and proposing a new interpretive framework, the article sharpens the key terms at stake and provides a clearer basis for advancing the debate about AI’s role in pastoral care.
This paper examines the integration of artificial intelligence (AI)-mediated pastoral care and pastoral psychology within pastoral ministry. Growing interest surrounds AI’s role in mental health support, spiritual formation, and therapeutic relationships. While AI demonstrates a capacity for rapid response, it raises fundamental questions about the nature of therapeutic presence. Employing a desktop qualitative approach, this study utilizes the digital imago dei as a conceptual framework to explore what constitutes genuinely therapeutic empathy in pastoral contexts. The findings indicate that although AI aids in building a digital church (e-megachurches), questions exist about its capacity to provide the core pastoral conditions of empathy, effective counseling, and unconditional positive regard. The paper concludes by highlighting risks to attachment, transference, and faith development while proposing hybrid care models that preserve the relational core of pastoral ministry. It introduces the concept of an algorithmic empathy deficit and contributes to digital pastoral psychology by bridging theological anthropology with clinical insights, offering practical hybrid frameworks for ethical AI integration.
Contemporary debates in the cognitive science of religion often portray religiosity as cognitively weak, manipulable, and opposed to critical thinking. This article challenges such reductionist interpretations by proposing a Thomistic framework for understanding religion as a source of cognitive trust and epistemic resilience. Drawing on the epistemology of Thomas Aquinas, we argue that faith is a rational act of the intellect—not blind assent but thinking with assent. Using a qualitative, normative-analytical approach, we examine religion’s ambivalent role in contexts of misinformation, disinformation, and digital manipulation (e.g., deepfakes). While religious communities can be vulnerable to ideological distortion, the Thomistic account of intellectual and moral virtues offers conceptual tools for discernment. Faith, understood analogically and open to doubt, fosters epistemic humility and mental flexibility rather than dogmatic closure. We argue that authentic religious practice can enhance cognitive safety by integrating moral formation, communal verification of truth claims, and virtue-based discernment. In this perspective, religion does not undermine critical thinking but may strengthen resistance to epistemic pollution in the digital age, provided it remains rooted in intellectual virtue rather than ideological rigidity.
Pastoral ministry traditionally emphasizes spiritual vitality while often neglecting the psychological well-being (PWB) of clergy, despite its fundamental importance for holistic flourishing and effective pastoral service. This study addresses a research gap by investigating the PWB among pastors in Hong Kong Chinese churches, moving beyond the burnout-focused literature to explore positive dimensions of clergy mental health. Drawing from Ryff’s six-factor model, this study examines key PWB dimensions—personal growth, positive relations with others, environmental mastery, autonomy, self-acceptance, and purpose in life—all critical elements for effective pastoral ministry. A quantitative survey was administered to 230 full-time pastors across Hong Kong Chinese churches. Descriptive results on a 6-point scale revealed overall low-mid PWB levels (M = 4.44, SD = 0.52), with personal growth (M = 4.71), positive relations with others (M = 4.70), and purpose in life (M = 4.58) emerging as the highest-rated dimensions. One-way ANOVA analyses identified significant differences in total PWB by age, education level, current ministry position, ordination status, years ordained, and self-reported health (all p <.05). Pearson correlation analyses confirmed that all six Ryff dimensions were significantly and positively correlated with total PWB (r =.68–.88, p <.001), with self-acceptance (r =.88) and environmental mastery (r =.83) demonstrating the strongest associations. These findings provide crucial baseline data on clergy PWB in Hong Kong, with implications for evidence-based pastoral care, seminary training, and church leadership support to enhance ministerial resilience and effectiveness.
The clergy role in the Church of England makes demands unlike those of any other profession, yet the established quantitative literature on clergy wellbeing has treated personality, psychological type, and emotional intelligence as relatively stable individual-level variables, measuring the outcomes of ministerial engagement without theorising the mechanism by which role and context actively constitute the minister over time. This article reports a qualitative investigation of that mechanism, drawing on semi-structured interview data from 25 Church of England archdeacons, analysed through a four-stage procedure comprising conscious attention, thematic analysis, ontological formation analysis, and emotional exegesis. The term ontological is used in its philosophical and theological sense – concerning the constitution of being rather than surface functioning – and the construct of the ontological engine is proposed to name a dynamic, recursive, and directional formation process through which sustained inhabitation of the clergy role and ministry context appears to transform the minister at the level of identity, self-understanding, and relational capacity, generatively or corrosively. Thematic analysis identifies seven substantive patterns: three role factors (role ambiguity, the clerical role as defence against authentic selfhood, and role differentiation as the ground of ministerial identity) and four contextual factors (corrosive encounter, temperament mismatch, activist time culture, and breach of the psychological contract), followed by a thematic conclusion addressing the engine’s generative pole. It is distinguished from role theory, person–environment fit theory, and professional socialisation by its emphasis on mechanism, directionality, and recursion. The findings carry implications for initial ministerial education, clergy appointments, and pastoral supervision.
This article examines the role of temporality in shaping female identity in Kavita Kané’s Ahalya’s Awakening. While feminist scholarship on mythological retellings has largely focused on voice, agency, and patriarchal silencing, comparatively little attention has been paid to the temporal structures that regulate identity within epic narratives. In the canonical Ramayana, Ahalya appears only at the moment of moral judgement, and her petrification is typically read as punishment. This study argues that the curse functions not merely as ethical condemnation but as temporal suspension – removing Ahalya from narrative, lived, and psychological time. Drawing upon feminist revisionist theory and narrative theories of temporality, particularly Paul Ricoeur’s conception of narrative identity, the article reads petrification as exclusion from experiential duration and awakening as re-entry into time. Kané’s retelling restores Ahalya’s prehistory, interiority, and reflective consciousness, thereby transforming myth from moral closure into temporal recovery. By foregrounding duration rather than judgement, this study demonstrates that patriarchal control in epic narratives operates through the regulation of narrative time. Kané’s revision reconfigures identity not as fixed verdict but as a process sustained through memory, reflection, and temporal continuity.
An increasingly common (though not new) phenomenon in the Christian Church in Canada is that of co-vocational ministry – pastors who also work outside the church, whether by choice or necessity. Despite this not being a rare approach in our day, many questions and challenges remain to be addressed. Therefore, in February 2025, Co-Vocational Canada, a ministry of Briercrest College and Seminary, brought together 23 denominational leaders, co-vocational practitioners, and academic leaders to answer questions about credentialing and education for co-vocational pastors. Findings from the online Co-Vocational Symposium reveal current characteristics of co-vocationality in Canada and challenges and benefits observed by participants, as well as a myriad of suggestions for better practices in the pursuit of healthy and sustainable co-vocational ministries.
