Interfaith Chaplaincy and Interpretive Hospitality

The pluralistic nature of the modern world introduces cultural and spiritual diversities that are well beyond the reasonable capacity of practitioners within the health or justice systems. CCAC Essential Capability 4 requires that Chaplains cab work with ethics and empathy in multi-cultural and multi-faith contexts.

Developing this capability requires that they develop interfaith capabilities.

Youngblood (2019) writes:

An interfaith chaplain is a spiritual caregiver who provides emotional and spiritual support to all persons, of any religion. In doing so, she must balance the various and competing cultural and religious norms that define human well-being. Therefore, spiritual care always involves several tensions:

First, a chaplain must respect the patient’s beliefs while also being authentic to her own tradition.

Second, she must provide religious services in a secularized profession operating in secularized institutions (hospitals).

Finally, she must account for other conflicting social and cultural factors, including family, ethnicity, and community.

Such tensions can be creative and rewarding, but negotiating these conflicting epistemologies

In this interesting article he argues for a disposition of “interpretive hospitality” that maintains the “otherness” of other religions and hence avoids stereotyping or distorting them. He also argues that a praxis-based centred on “ritual hospitality” enables caregivers to open up a hospitable space in which patients can safely express their spiritual beliefs, practices, and needs.

Noting that this does not ignore or resolve belief-based conflicts, he maintains that a hospitality-based allows care to proceed in a way that avoids hostility. Having argued this from a Christian perspective, Youngblood invited scholars and practitioners of other faiths into dialogue with the hospitalities of other religions. This may be applied to all belief systems, religious or otherwise.

References

Youngblood, P. W. (2019). Interfaith Chaplaincy as Interpretive Hospitality. Religions, 10(3), 226. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10030226