Injustice and the Care of Souls, Second Edition

Book excerpt: The practice of pastoral care cannot escape the realities of injustices and oppression that often operate in the context where caregiving happens. In response, Sheryl A. Kujawa-Holbrook and Karen B. Montagno present a compilation of essays that reach beyond individualistic, white, Western, middle-class models of caregiving that can mimic systems of injustice. Instead, the resulting volume offers constructive approaches to caregiving that more effectively meet the needs of those who routinely experience marginalization and oppression. Kujawa-Holbrook and Montagno argue that the fundamental work of religious traditions, including caregiving, is about human freedom and wholeness. As such, Injustice and the Care of Souls helps chaplains, pastoral counselors, social service workers, and other caregivers to better situate their work within the contexts of those seeking care. The book also helps caregivers to reflect on ways their social locations affect their work. Since its first publication nearly fifteen years ago, this book uniquely offered content that situated contexts such as substructures in urban neighborhoods, religious liturgical practices, and the impact of public policies as the focus for examining critical dynamics surrounding those seeking care, the caregiver, and the hope for oppression-sensitive forms of pastoral care. This second edition revises and reorganizes previous essays while providing additional ones. New chapters include ones that highlight the dead time of prison life, the impact of moral decision-making on veterans, and the life-or-death challenges that immigrants and refugees often face. Kujawa-Holbrook and Montagno divide this edition's twenty-seven essays into five parts, with the first part devoted to the pastoral caregiver's positionality. The remaining sections address pastoral caregiving as embodied practices, cultural fluency and intersectional awareness, pastoral practice across the life span, and pastoral practice and public witness. This volume's contributors offer spiritual caregivers a compilation of approaches to the care of souls that bring healing, voice, and wholeness to the marginalized and oppressed.