Project Summary

How to offer respectful and helpful spiritual care to those who define themselves as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) is a growing challenge for students and supervisors of Clinical Pastoral Education. How to do this from a place of one’s own religious integrity is necessarily entwined with the first. Working as a CPE Supervisor in a setting with a predominance of residents/patients who fit the SBNR categorization, I seek to learn more about assessing the spiritual needs and resources of these persons, offering respectful spiritual care, and evaluating that work, so that I can help my students grow in comfort and competence in these skills. I will gather information from a wide variety of places: literature (history, sociology, theology, pastoral care, education, and so forth), chaplains secular and religious, and academics teaching courses about the SBNR. I will teach the new material in my CPE program, write an article targeted to chaplains, write an article for CPE supervisors, and offer to do a workshop for the Massachusetts Conference of the UCC on applying what I have learned to the congregational setting.