Narrative Spiritual Care: Resistance and Resonance

This workshop, led by a team of narratively-oriented spiritual care scholars, will explain the basics of narrative spiritual care and invite participants to try out conversations using this method in pairs and in collective conversation with the entire group. Narrative spiritual care is an emergent strategy that brings the methodology of narrative therapy and practice into pastoral and spiritual care. The narrative approach was founded in the 1980s by Michael White and David Epston, Australian social workers who turned toward the disciplines of poststructural theory (such as feminism, postcolonialism, literary theory, and queer studies) to understand human identity. Narrative spiritual care foregrounds resistance and resonance: resisting dominant cultural stories that try to tell us who we are and offer limited and false choices for how we ought to live; and experiencing resonance—spiritual and social support for our deeply held values, beliefs, and purposes for living.