Pastoral Care in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities

Dear Colleagues,

The modern history of pastoral care in the last hundred years has gained existential legitimacy and praxis capability through direct encounters with human persons and their communities. The infusion of social sciences, particularly psychology, has provided pastoral care necessary tools for accompaniment across the lifespan and these endeavors remain through the disciplines of accompaniment, meaning-making, and transformation.

Pastoral care in its praxis understandings includes the care for the whole person, including the communal and contextual realities of modern and postmodern life. As we look at the current landscape, however, it has become clear that pastoral care must consider the contemporary and emerging challenges that exist today. There seems an acceleration of pressures on persons and communities prompting not only personal crises but accelerated change in seemingly every domain of life, personal, communal, systemic, global, technological, environmental, to name but a few.

These emergent needs and challenges require contemporary educators, practitioners, and researchers to address these pressing demands for clarity and insight as we face the problems of today. Issues such as the role of technology in human development and identity formation; moral foundations for pastoral care and and communal health; spiritual perspectives and practices that facilitate wholeness across the lifespan; multicultural awareness facilitating best practices; narrative and/or positive psychology and spirituality and their applications can be viewed as examples.

This Special Issue will serve scholars and practitioners as an informed resource for current and emergent challenges, guiding the field within the contemporary demands of pastoral praxis and its applications.

Among the themes that researchers may well pursue include:

• Intercultural pastoral care and counseling;
• Spiritual perspectives and practices that support pastoral care;
• Care of systems and communities;
• Technology and human flourishing and/or its absence;
• Pastoral care towards nurture for Earth’s home;
• Emergent forms of stress and anxiety;
• Evolving communities of care;
• Theologies and spiritualities of accompaniment;
• Contemporary challenges of identity formation;
• Pastoral care in contexts of polarization.

Prof. Dr. William Schmidt
Prof. Dr. Jody Clarke
Guest Editors

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• pastoral care
• pastoral counseling
• spiritual accompaniment
• systems care
• spirituality
• pastoral theology