Teaching Genealogies of Spiritual Care

Background: Teaching the history of spiritual care in the United States is a genealogical journey into white American Protestantism. Over generations, spiritual care histories positioned even contextual pastoral theologies as contemporary responses to and outgrowths of a white Protestant epistemological starting point. This assumption of a shared starting point contributes to increasing calls for standardization in teaching methods for chaplaincy and clinical spiritual care.

A healing justice framework, however, calls spiritual care practitioners into collective memory (Page and Woodland, 2023). Collective memory calls practitioners to rootedness in both place and in ancestral healing methodologies to resist white supremacist strategies of intentional separation from ancestral knowledge, and to subsequently reclaim ancestral practices of resilience and care (Page and Woodland, 2023; Riley, 2023; Riley, 2024).

Research Question: How might genealogy, as an ethnographic pedagogical methodology, construct opportunities for spiritual care students to embrace collective memory and trace their lineages of care to and beyond white American Protestantism?

Methodology: My project constructs a genealogical pedagogical methodology for spiritual care students to trace their lineages of care to and beyond white American Protestantism. 

Construction of this methodology is a womanist work and is currently forming in community through exploratory dialogue and insight from African American genealogists and from African American women and nonbinary spiritual care practitioners who traverse African Diasporic traditions and face institutional pressures to conform to a method of standardization of care that pushes against their religious, ancestral, and communal epistemologies.

This working genealogical pedagogical methodology engages storytelling of rootedness inside traditions of practice; explores students’ ancestrally (religious acenstry) derived artifacts and technologies used in contemporary care practices; and investigates archives retaining religious ancestral insight.

Contributions: Pastoral theologian Hellena Moon (2023) uses genealogy to trace the field of spiritual care beyond the confines of colonialism. My project benefits and diverts from her work to construct a _genealogical research methodology_ for students to trace their individual and communal lineages of spiritual care back toward their religious ancestral starting points.

A methodology to construct genealogies of spiritual care will assist spiritual care students belonging to African Diasporic traditions, Indigenous traditions, Pagan and eco-spiritualities, and other minoritized religions who wish to trace their own histories of spiritual care and determine a precedent for methods of spiritual care work outside of white American Protestantism.

Spiritual care students belonging to Christian traditions, or those searching for a spiritual tradition, would also benefit from this methodology. Often in the name of interreligious care, practitioners utilize Indigenous and African religious-ancestral healing technologies based on assumed access. Through constructing genealogies of spiritual care, Christian spiritual care students can situate their own practices, challenge their presumed access to other traditions, interrogate assumptions of universality of care practices rooted in Christianity, and interrogate how their Christian spiritual care practices may contribute to colonialist and supremacist norms.  

Determining diverse starting points of spiritual care and diverse access to care practices works to resist increasing calls toward standardization of teaching chaplaincy and clinical spiritual care - standards constructed based on the assumption of a common starting point in white American Protestantism.