Belonging to the World through Body, Trust, and Trinity: Climate Change and Pastoral Care with University Students
This article explores how pastoral care is performed in an age of climate change. University students suffer from a wide range of stresses, reducing their well-being. Climate change compounds these stress reactions, even where students are not directly affected. As climate change affects concrete, m...
Main Author: | |
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Format: | Electronic Article |
Language: | English |
Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
Journals Online & Print: | |
Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
Published: |
MDPI
2022
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In: |
Religions
Year: 2022, Volume: 13, Issue: 6 |
Further subjects: | B
Ethnography
B University Students B Mentalizing B Pastoral Care B the new climatic regime B Climate Change B Trinity B Sustainability B Psychological Stress B Feminist Theology B in-depth interview |
Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) Volltext (kostenfrei) |
Summary: | This article explores how pastoral care is performed in an age of climate change. University students suffer from a wide range of stresses, reducing their well-being. Climate change compounds these stress reactions, even where students are not directly affected. As climate change affects concrete, material matters, human reactions to it may no longer be viewed and treated as purely inner psychic states. Thus, climate change disrupts usual divisions of material, social, and mental features as separate categories, underscoring instead the close-knit relations between them. Given the far-reaching ways climate change affects mental health, the article presents an ethnographical-theologically-driven model for basic conversation in pastoral care with students in the midst of escalating climate events. Making use of theories from anthropology, psychology, and theology, this article builds on in-depth interviews with Danish university chaplains about their pastoral care with students. The model extrapolates from these theories how pastoral care may support students in the era of climate change through a triad of organizing themes that come to the fore in the interviews: "Mothering the Content", "Loving Vital Force", and "Befriending the Environment". |
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ISSN: | 2077-1444 |
Contains: | Enthalten in: Religions
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Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.3390/rel13060527 |