Healing, Listening, and Liberation: Care Practices for Transformative Racial Justice

This panel brings together three important recent monographs from mid-career psychologists of religion and pastoral theologians who are interrogating a similar transformative question: What insights do the psychology of religion and spiritual care offer for practical strategies in the ongoing struggle against social injustice and racist state violence? Each book approaches this question from overlapping perspectives within womanist theology, the psychology of religion, and intercultural spiritual care, yet share in their commitments to transformative liberation—particularly of caregiving and protest spaces. The panel invites each author into dialogue with a designated respondent whose scholarly expertise is directly relevant to and extends the concerns of the featured text. Taken together, these works represent transformative research that push the fields of psychology of religion and spiritual care to take account of how resistance, spiritual formation, and deep listening function are co-constitutive for racial justice.