Browsing by Subject "Secular"

ABSTRACT

Lori Anne Brown

Duke Divinity School, 2015

Primary Advisor: Esther Acolatse

Assistant Professor of the Practice of Pastoral Theology and World Christianity

Secondary Advisor: Dean Sujin Pak

Assistant Research Professor of the History of Christianity; Associate Dean for Academic Programs

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the challenges that Christian chaplains experience to their authority in secular medical institutions and to explore possible recommendations that can help alleviate them. More specifically, by means of a questionnaire this examination intends to explore if these challenges are both or either personal or institutionally related. Therefore, this examination should be a resource that encourages the Christian chaplain to be an informed interlocutor pertaining to the issues of what his or her God-given authority means. Lastly, this thesis will demonstrate why it is essential for chaplains to know, understand, accept, and embrace the God-given authority bestowed upon them to minister effectively and competently in secular medical institutions.

Key Terms

For the purpose of this study, seven terms require annotation. First, the term “Christian chaplains” refers to individuals who have been baptized, profess Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, who ascribe to the orthodoxy and orthopraxis of the Christian faith, and who minister in secular medical institutions. Second, the term “secular medical institution” denotes a public, non-religious institution that provides medical care for people. Thirdly, the term “living human document,” which was coined by Anton Boisen, refers to those to whom Christian chaplains minister. This group includes patients, their families and friends, and the chaplain’s colleagues. Fourth, the term “voices of suffering” refers to the patients who share their narratives while seeking pastoral care. Fifth, the term “bearing witness” refers to the belief that as Christians we are called to develop the skills to bear witness in both word and deed to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Sixth, the term “narratives” refers to the personal stories that patients share. The seventh term “holistic care” is a concept in medical practice that upholds and respects all aspects of a person’s needs: physical, emotional, and spiritual.

I employed three methods in this thesis. The first method was exploratory research to review and study literature to support my argument. The second was to use a method of analogy. In this method, the anecdotal evidence was aggregated in correlation with personal related experiences to help Christian chaplains to learn how to minister effectively in the challenging contexts of the secular medical institution. Moreover, this was done in order to examine how the Christian chaplain can learn to walk competently and effectively with authority between the worlds of religion and medicine. Third, I used a confidential questionnaire to gather additional information from seven Christian chaplains who have ministered or are currently ministering in this context to support the argument of this thesis, as well as to offer recommendations that can help alleviate some of the challenges they experience regarding their authority.

The basic conclusion drawn from the examination and methods employed is that Christian chaplains do experience various types of challenges to their authority than can impact their ministry. However, the conclusion demonstrates that as a result to their commitment to the call of chaplaincy, chaplains recognize that irrespective of the challenges they experience to their authority they are called to compassionately and effectively serve the sick and suffering. Moreover, as a result of their commitment to the call of health care chaplaincy, the chaplains have provided their insight that indicates why some of these challenges exist. Lastly, as a result of the questionnaire the participants provide some practical recommendations that can be implemented into CPE programs, which could possibly help alleviate some of types of the challenges they encounter to their pastoral authority.

What we now call “liberal individualism”—that is, the belief in the inalienable rights and freedom of the individual—first emerged in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods in Europe, and continues to be a defining feature of Western democracies. The liberal valorization of freedom as the sovereign moral concept was a consequence of Enlightenment philosophy, scientific progress, and secularization, which led to the view that human life is self-contained and without an externally defined purpose, and that human relations can be understood by considering society simply as an aggregate of individuals who are each driven by desire and self-interest. Values previously safeguarded by divine authority devolved into matters of choice by the individual will, and many observers have suggested that this change resulted in a moral lassitude that, paradoxically, made it more difficult to realize the Enlightenment ideals of universal liberty, rights, and justice. Arguments grounded in premises of natural freedom and rights often end up rationalizing absolute authoritarian power, as we see, for example, in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.

This dissertation examines how British writers of the Romantic period such as Olaudah Equiano, William Godwin, and Mary Shelley responded to this moral dilemma of liberal individualism by developing a new understanding of humility in their works. The meaning of humility in the West has been fundamentally shaped by the Jewish and Christian traditions that view humility as a spiritual quality that disposes an individual toward reverence for and submission to God. As a quality that goes against the Enlightenment emphasis on human reason and agency, humility underwent a steady devaluation in the eighteenth century and onward, perceived, for example, as a “monkish kind of virtue” by David Hume and a “slave morality” by Friedrich Nietzsche. This study argues that instead of returning to the religiously infused concept of humility, British Romantic authors developed a new form of humility for the secular age, one that not only preserves human agency but also emphasizes the need for human action for collective good. This humility does not focus on self-abasement but on a selfless mood, predicated on an immanent framework derived from Stoicism and the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza, which were influential in the eighteenth century. In three chapters, this study shows how Equiano, Godwin, and Shelley’s instantiations of Romantic humility respectively illuminate Romantic humility as it informs human relations, historical progress, and human-nonhuman relations. In so doing, this study shows that Romanticism cannot be viewed simply as an extension of Enlightenment individualism but also as an era of collectivist humility.

This dissertation examines the philosophy and poetry of three major British Romantic writers (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth) to contest a popular narrative promulgated by literary scholars and intellectual historians that identifies the Romantic movement as a period of progressive secularization in Western modernity. Whether readers subject secularization to critique, such as Charles Taylor does, or welcome it, as M.H. Abrams does, they alike insist that secularization involves a cultural shift from a transcendent ontology to an immanent one and that Romanticism was essential to this shift. I argue, on the contrary, that Romanticism offers a robustly transcendent ontology and that the failure to recognize this very often results from a reader’s reliance on a limited conceptual framework (a Christianity vs. secularism binary, or, in its broader form, secularism vs. organized religion). Thinking in terms of this dichotomy leads readers to misinterpret and overlook genuinely transcendent (i.e. religious) ideas and dispositions in Romantic writers and, therefore, mischaracterize them as secular. The term “secular” effectively erases alternative forms of religiosity, including what I term "Romantic religion," by tossing idiosyncratic theologies and spiritualities together with genuinely irreligious and immanentist philosophies into one single category defined strictly in terms of negation (i.e. that which is not Christianity/organized religion). This tendency is clearest when readers implicitly synonymize “religion” with Christianity, or “transcendent ontology” with Christianity, or “belief in God” with “belief in patriarchal, personalist monotheism.” When readers inherit philosophical and theological concepts strictly from orthodox Christianity, they overlook novel forms of religiosity found in the Romantic period. For example, a writer’s rejection of personalist monotheism or a writer’s belief in the infinite temporality and/or cyclicity of the universe is mistaken for evidence of atheism (one of the many terms subsumed by “secular”). Treating each author in each chapter, I argue that Coleridge accommodates Romanticism to orthodox Christianity, while Shelley and the young Wordsworth redefine “God” as a transcendent real absolute manifest as the universe/Nature, rather than a man who creates and intervenes in the universe/Nature. To break away from the Christianity vs. secularism framework, I use concepts not only from Christian theology (Coleridge), but also Neoplatonism (all authors), Indian Vedic philosophy (Shelley), and Japanese Zen Buddhism (Wordsworth). I argue that none of these writers ought to be regarded as secular, since none of them reject religion per se. To go even further, Romantic religion not only redefines religiosity such that the experience of God can take place outside the clerical, dogmatic, and institutional boundaries of recognized major world religions (in Romantic religion it occurs within aesthetics and the inner life of feeling) but it can also be absent from the experiences of persons traditionally identified as religious solely on the basis of their creedal assent, outward conformity to a given moral law, and/or participation in the ritual practices of an institution. Nonetheless, as the case of Coleridge shows us, Romantic religion is not mutually exclusive with being religious in a traditional sense since Coleridge retains a Romantic sensibility even after converting to Anglicanism.