Faith Organizations and Ethnically Diverse Elders: A Community Action Model

SUMMARY

In this article we argue that faith organizations should become involved in developing social service programs for older adults in the community. In the current political climate, the government is providing fewer social service programs, and future prospects for services are bleak. The literature provides evidence that religion and faith-based organizations are important in the lives of Americans, particularly the current cohort of ethnically diverse elders. Our earlier Korean church study found that Korean older people benefit from church-based services and church-involved, older Koreans had higher rates of well-being. Churches remain untapped resources and we believe they should be extensively involved in provision of community programs. We offer a twelve-step model for the development of community programs under the auspices of faith organizations: The Faith-Based Community Action Model (FBCAM).     

Evolutionary Conceptual Analysis: Faith Community Nursing

The aim of the study was to report an evolutionary concept analysis of faith community nursing (FCN). FCN is a source of healthcare delivery in the USA which has grown in comprehensiveness and complexity. With increasing healthcare cost and a focus on access and prevention, FCN has extended beyond the physical walls of the faith community building. Faith communities and healthcare organizations invest in FCN and standardized training programs exist. Using Rodgers’ evolutionary analysis, the literature was examined for antecedents, attributes, and consequences of the concept. This design allows for understanding the historical and social nature of the concept and how it changes over time. A search of databases using the keywords FCN, faith community nurse, parish nursing, and parish nurse was done. The concept of FCN was explored using research and theoretical literature. A theoretical definition and model were developed with relevant implications. The search results netted a sample of 124 reports of research and theoretical articles from multiple disciplines: medicine, education, religion and philosophy, international health, and nursing. Theoretical definition: FCN is a method of healthcare delivery that is centered in a relationship between the nurse and client (client as person, family, group, or community). The relationship occurs in an iterative motion over time when the client seeks or is targeted for wholistic health care with the goal of optimal wholistic health functioning. Faith integrating is a continuous occurring attribute. Health promoting, disease managing, coordinating, empowering and accessing health care are other essential attributes. All essential attributes occur with intentionality in a faith community, home, health institution and other community settings with fluidity as part of a community, national, or global health initiative. A new theoretical definition and corresponding conceptual model of FCN provides a basis for future nursing knowledge and model-based applications for evidence-based practice and research.     

香港社区礼俗与信仰共生——道教太平清醮中所见的信仰复合

本文以香港新界地区的太平清醮庆典仪式的田野调查为基础,从道教教义、仪式理论以及太平清醮仪式的宗教意义等角度分析宗教信仰在中国人生活世界中的地位和功能,进而尝试说明不同的宗教信仰为什么可以在中国人的宗教生活中共存共生。作者试图说明,由于道教已经通过其仪法结构将教义和宗教思想传递出来,以道教仪式为基本形式的社区礼俗自然就可以包容其他异质的信仰。     

Training Community Clergy in Serious Illness: Balancing Faith and Medicine

Community-based clergy are highly engaged in helping seriously ill patients address spiritual concerns at the end of life (EOL). While they desire EOL training, no data exist in guiding how to conceptualize a clergy-training program. The objective of this study was used to identify best practices in an EOL training program for community clergy. As part of the National Clergy Project on End-of-Life Care, the project conducted key informant interviews and focus groups with active clergy in five US states (California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and Texas). A diverse purposive sample of 35 active clergy representing pre-identified racial, educational, theological, and denominational categories hypothesized to be associated with more intensive utilization of medical care at the EOL. We assessed suggested curriculum structure and content for clergy EOL training through interviews and focus groups for the purpose of qualitative analysis. Thematic analysis identified key themes around curriculum structure, curriculum content, and issues of tension. Curriculum structure included ideas for targeting clergy as well as lay congregational leaders and found that clergy were open to combining resources from both religious and health-based institutions. Curriculum content included clergy desires for educational topics such as increasing their medical literacy and reviewing pastoral counseling approaches. Finally, clergy identified challenging barriers to EOL training needing to be openly discussed, including difficulties in collaborating with medical teams, surrounding issues of trust, the role of miracles, and caution of prognostication. Future EOL training is desired and needed for community-based clergy. In partnering together, religious–medical training programs should consider curricula sensitive toward structure, desired content, and perceived clergy tensions.     

Systems Approaches to Occupational Vocal Health: Considerations for Community Faith Leaders

Journal of Religion and Health - Systems thinking approaches can benefit the occupational vocal health of vocally reliant workers. This paper explores community faith leaders as an example of a...     

Performances of Faith: A Relation Between Conscious and Unconscious Organizations of Faith

Performances of faith are found in ordinary and extraordinary stories, behavior, and rituals, and they are inextricably yoked to unconscious and conscious processes and organizations of faith experience. This article explores the relation between unconscious and conscious processes and organizations of faith. The claim is that the unconscious system represents unformulated experiences of faith that are affectively and relationally organized. In human development these unconscious organizations of faith experience are partially transformed by a person's conscious and self-reflective use of symbols and language. At the same time, conscious and self-reflective organizations of faith, manifested in narratives, rituals, and use of other symbolic media, continue to be shaped by unconscious processes and unconscious configurations of faith. An appreciation of the dynamic interaction between unconscious and conscious processes and organizations of faith focuses one's attention to the complexity of human performances of faith in ministry.     

Gay and Catholic: Accepting My Sexuality,Finding Community,Living My Faith

Abstract

This article considers how the insights of gay and lesbian Christians can be situated in relation to a sex-negative religious tradition. Are they to be seen as anomalous appendages or as integral to the tradition itself? Thinking of the Bible as a ‘faith family photo album’ offers a useful analogy for exploring this methodological issue. The image of a photo album provokes questions as to which characters and primal scenes achieve archival status within religious communities and which are removed from public view. In this frame we can discern that what is received from the past is produced out of messy familial disputes often provoked by radical and subversive practice. The work of disputing which images can be displayed in the family album must continue as it is in the interplay between traditional teachings and transgressive performance that transformative adaptations occur without which Christianity cannot thrive as a living tradition.     

信仰与理性的冲突与谐和——对克尔凯郭尔信仰观之合理性的一种辩护

在理性与信仰的关系问题上,认为克尔凯郭尔主张基督教信仰只关系到主观而与客观无关,其"真理是主体性"、"信仰是荒谬的"等命题是对理性之摒弃的看法是偏狭的。克氏在信仰上对主观真理的强调和对客观真理的质疑建立在承认人的罪性以及因之而人的理性遭到了破坏这一前提上,这一点并不与理性本身相冲突,而毋宁说是人的理性层次的问题;另一方面,在克氏,基督教信仰的主观性就其自身而论也必须以理性客观性为前提,因无正确的客观性作保证就没有克氏要求的那种主观性,其眼中的信仰的主观真理也就不复存在了。     

The Challenges and Opportunities of Faith Community (Parish) Nursing in an Ageing Society

SUMMARY

Faith Community Nursing is one form of health ministry that provides an opportunity to meet the challenges of an ageing society. This nursing is based on principles of communion, stewardship, service and transformation to promote the health of the community. Faith Community Nurses (FCNs) provide education, advocacy, counselling and assistance with care management to the faith community and beyond. Their work is complimented and supplemented by health ministry volunteers, using their knowledge and skills to build the social capital of the community.     

Trauma and Development: A Faith Perspective

This essay describes the relationship between psychological trauma, psychosocial development and faith. I delineate four phases of development, each possessing particular psychosocial needs, achievements, and capacities. In addition, each phase includes specific ways of organizing experience and relating to objects in terms of the dynamics of trust-distrust and loyalty-disloyalty. Thus, trust-distrust and loyalty-disloyalty hold different meanings and functions in each phase. Throughout these phases, primary and secondary transitional objects provide persons with safe objects to recognize and work through the meanings and affects associated with changes in beliefs about and experiences of trust-distrust and loyalty-disloyalty. I suggest that trauma impacts phase specific capacities and achievements consequently disrupting one's ability to organize and relate to objects in terms of the dynamics of faith. Pastoral Care and Counseling     

The Concept of Faith: A Philosophical Investigation

International Journal for Philosophy of Religion -     

Engaging the Faith Community for Public Health Advocacy: An Agenda for the Surgeon General

This article proposes an agenda for the Surgeon General of the United States that is consonant with the traditional public health approach of “upstream” and “midstream” intervention addressing social and institutional determinants of health. Accordingly, this features a prominent role for expanded partnerships between the faith-based and public health sectors. Such an agenda would revise the current status quo for the Surgeon General, whose celebrated bully pulpit is currently focused more on encouraging “downstream” compliance with federal guidelines related to lifestyle behavior modification. A new faith-based agenda, by contrast, could more effectively advocate for core features of the traditional public health ethic, including primary prevention, the multiple determinants of population health, communitarianism and social justice, and a global perspective, supported by the historic prophetic role of the faith traditions.