This session brings together theoretical, ethnographic, community, and clinical chaplaincy innovations at the liberatory frontiers to professionally impact spaces of unfreedom and suffering. Examples of effective advocacy and transformation come from value-based community organizing to turn private grief into public witness confronting systemic injustice in workplace and movement chaplaincy; ways in which Asian and migrant communities' ethnicity, belief systems, and cultural understandings of healing, including in narratives of ancestors and ghosts, highlight tensions between Western models of care and non-Western spiritual traditions particularly related to trauma, displacement, and racialized structural exclusions informing clinical hospital encounters; advocacy in end-of-life spiritual care with patients who have severe mental health challenges sheds light on the limitations of standard models of care and possible alternatives; and a case study from European university chaplaincy of how to transform chaplaincy from a siloed, minoritized profession serving minority religous populations to a multifaith, whole-organization change agent.
In recent years, chaplains have wrestled with the perceived limits of their own profession in addressing systemic injustice and suffering. While spiritual care and accompaniment have been martialed by pastoral theologians and chaplains to confront personal suffering, these practices have begun to wander into zones of political contestation. In critically reviewing two models of chaplaincy operating in such zones, workplace and movement chaplaincy, I argue that the former illustrates the potential pacifying dimensions of spiritual care per se and the former exemplifies the limits of pastoral accompaniment. To effectively meet spaces of unfreedom, chaplaincy must deepen its identity within the intersections of other fields and discourses, specifically value-based community organizing. By deploying Dorthee Sölle’s work on suffering, this essay hopes to weaponize chaplaincy’s capacity to “allow suffering to speak” for the purposes of organizing for real power, turning private grief into an effective public witness.
This study explores how the Christian-rooted framework of chaplaincy shapes spiritual care in American hospitals and its challenges in meeting the diverse needs of Asian and migrant communities. It examines how ethnicity, belief systems, and cultural understandings of healing inform experiences of life and death, highlighting tensions between Western care models and non-Western spiritual traditions. Migration histories, ancestral ties, and ghost narratives shape how patients experience fear and grief, aspects that conventional psychological treatments often overlook. By examining hauntings, this research positions hospitals as liminal spaces where ghosts materialize—representing unresolved trauma, displacement, and structural exclusion that continue to influence clinical encounters. Additionally, it examines interracial and interreligious encounters in clinical settings, highlighting how different racial and ethnic groups navigate shared spaces of healing. Through ethnographic fieldwork, this study advocates for structurally competent, culturally responsive models of spiritual care beyond dominant biomedical and Christian paradigms.
This paper explores the challenges of end-of-life spiritual care with patients who have severe mental health challenges. I argue that chaplains can play an important role as an advocate for these patients. I also argue that chaplains can approach their work with greater skill and care when they are aware of a patient's medical diagnosis, and can advocate with the medical team for the continued possibility of sustaining religious experience even amid severe mental illness. In addition, I explore how mental health challenges make it complicated if not impossible to adapt some standard models of end-of-life care, but that ways of caring for patients with mental health challenges can be found.
In Europe, a University chaplaincy is typically perceived as a solitary wizened tree in a desolate landscape providing meagre shelter for a few ‘adherents’. Such centres risk becoming ‘repositories of religion’ (Dinham, 2016), for a minority group at an otherwise secular institution, whether providing higher education, healthcare, penal or other services. Isolated chaplaincy professionals, themselves minoritised, serve people also institutionally minoritised.
This paper analyses the opposite perspective.
Our work moved a multifaith chaplaincy from a religious repository, into an embedded whole-organisation change-agent. Our experience shows how a chaplaincy can be re-interpreted as a much-needed rhizome (Deleuze/Guattari: 1980) that produces and replicates caring resources on religion/belief to the organisation.
What could be learned from these insights, in terms of innovations in liberatory edges, professional frontiers and, above all, perspectives? What is gained—and what challenges arise—when chaplaincies offer a fresh understanding of their role and practise listening, researching and responding?