5 okt. - 9 okt. 2025
Nijmegen
Voor meer informatie, zie www.raadkpv.nl
Out of the Depths famously refers to the biography of Anton Boisen, instigator of the Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) Movement some one hundred years ago, a movement that has now spread out at centres all over the world. At these locations, professionals in pastoral and spiritual care are being trained and coached to explore their inner world at the service of their spiritual work with patients and clients at various care and church settings. At this centennial, it is good to take stock of the nature of their work. This regards the themes and issues of the patients they address; their counselling methods and techniques; and their training, formation, and supervision practices in pastoral care and education. Like their patients, pastors and health care chaplains/spiritual caregivers live in a ‘wounded world.’ Even though the application and practice of CPE varies across different global contexts, it remains based on broad pastoral care practices and principles. Pastoral care wrestles with the task of addressing existential and religious concerns that this world – torn apart by conflict, exclusion and poverty – inflicts upon people, be it on their communal structures, personal lives, the groups that they belong to, or on the world that we all share.
At the conference, spirituality, as arguably the center of pastoral care, is taken as a searchlight to define the identity and contours of the CPE movement. Spirituality is deeply embedded in the interpretation of religious texts and practices that define both individual faiths and shared worldviews. Hermeneutics is the discipline in humanities that addresses spiritual sources and interprets these for their significance regarding personal and shared concerns. Among other things, a focus on hermeneutics in pastoral care is a recognition that multiple factors and forces converge on an individual to trigger existential crisis. Hence, these factors need to be interpreted. This ‘hermeneutical’ perspective of existential interpretation – simultaneously addressing both concerns of individual persons and of humankind as such – has been one of the anchors of CPE and pastoral care generally.
16 juli 2025 - 8:15