Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care in the Twenty-First Century

An Introduction

By: Wendy Cadge - editor, Shelly Rambo - editor

Narrated by: Tanya Eby

Wendy Cadge and Shelly Rambo demonstrate the urgent need, highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, to position the long history and practice of chaplaincy within the rapidly changing landscape of American religion and spirituality. This book provides a much-needed road map for training and renewing chaplains across a professional continuum that spans major sectors of American society, including hospitals, prisons, universities, the military, and nursing homes.

Written by a team of multidisciplinary experts and drawing on ongoing research at the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab at Brandeis University, Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care in the Twenty-First Century identifies three central competencies—individual, organizational, and meaning-making—that all chaplains must have, and it provides the resources for building those skills. Featuring profiles of working chaplains, the book positions intersectional issues of religious diversity, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other markers of identity as central to the future of chaplaincy as a profession.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 The University of North Carolina Press (P)2022 Audible, Inc.

Useful, and also not that useful

Useful: This book describes the often overlooked interpersonal aspects of chaplain ministry. There are some approaches and intervention methods you will find useful.

Not useful: this book is way too focused on race and gender (it is super woke)—the book is saturated in it. Unsurprisingly, they even present paradigms for assessment and intervention based on that worldview.

Either way, I’d still recommend reading it; you will still learn a couple useful things.

Very good read, highly recommend! Good narration p

Very good read, highly recommend! Good narration performance. Good information, easily understandable. Will listen again!

20 Year Chaplain and Trainer of Chaplains

As a professional healthcare chaplain of 20 years and as one who actively trains chaplains, this is the best book on Audible about chaplaincy. To those who believe it to be "too woke," if you approach a patient with racism, sexism, homophobic, transphobic, religious intolerance, or any other unchecked bias, you will do harm. Chaplaincy is about the spiritual care of vulnerable people in crisis. You must approach with compassion and openness if you want to be of help. If that is too woke, please feel free to go back to sleep, find another book, and not be a chaplain.

The book covers the history, the basic functions of professional chaplains, and a small introduction to how one becomes a chaplain. It contains many examples from diverse chaplains, diverse care situations, and diverse contexts because that is who chaplains are and where they serve.

The book is the culmination of many hours of work of hundreds of professional chaplains, ACPE educators, and academic professors. No book is perfect, but this one does a good job of presenting the world of professional chaplaincy in the 2020s.

A helpful modern overview of chaplaincy

This book presents a modern view of chaplaincy’s role in society. Highly recommend recommended. The recording is well produced.

Topics with agendas

Appreciate this read for orienting a person to chaplaincy. The agenda/ emphasis to disclose and see how chaplains may address cultural and organizational biases is notable