The Meanings and Uses of Spirituality: From secular therapy to spiritual therapy?

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The Meanings and Uses of SpiritualityFrom
secular therapy to spiritual therapy?

• Professor Gordon Lynch
• Department of Religious Studies
• University of Kent

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This is me

• (ed.) Clinical Counselling in Pastoral Settings,
• Routledge, 1999.
• Pastoral Care and Counselling, Sage, 2002.

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• Understanding Theology and
• Popular Culture, Blackwell, 2005.
• The Sacred in the Modern World,
• Oxford University Press, 2012.

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From secular therapy.
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to spiritual therapy?

• Increasing attention to issues of religion and
  spirituality within the mainstream of counselling
  and psychotherapy

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to spiritual therapy?

• the rise of more explicitly religious/spiritual
  therapeutic models and organizations

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to spiritual therapy?

• the emergence of more explicit religious and
  spiritual critiques of secular therapeutic models

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The collapse of confident narratives of
secularization

• 1966
  1995

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The return of the repressedthe 1960s and all
that

• The rise of the holistic milieu/alternative
  spiritualities, the incorporation of counselling
  and psychotherapy into pastoral care, and the
  backlash of conservative religious sub-cultures

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What the story excludes

• the role of counselling and psychotherapy in the
  secularization of pastoral care
• Usually few of those undergoing theological
  training have sufficient knowledge of psychology,
  especially in its application to themselves, and
  fewer still can grasp that acceptance of the
  knowledge of man sic that has come through
  psychology makes inevitable an alteration in
  emphasis in religious teaching and in some
  aspects the modification or jettisoning of some
  commonly taught theological doctrines or
  religious attitudes.
• R.S. Lee, Principles of Pastoral Counselling, p.5.

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What the story excludes

• the aversion of pastoral theologians to the
  incorporation of counselling and psychotherapy
  into the theology and practice of pastoral care
• An accredited hierarchical pastoral movement
  will be professional, problem solving or problem
  preventing, standardized and defined. What is
  required is pastoral care which is lay,
  corporate, adventurous, variegated and diffuse
  The pastoral counselling movement must be seen
  as part of a too general assumption by society
  that we come to the good life by delineating
  problems and then either avoiding them or solving
  them.
• Bob Lambourne, 1971,
• Objections to a National Pastoral Organization

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An alternative narrativelocating secular,
religious and spiritual forms of therapy in a
broader social context

• Therapy and spirituality as both expressions of
  wider processes of individualization
• Spirituality emerging as significant in
  specific professional contexts
• The open market-place of care generating
  conflicts over knowledge, healing and power
• Secular and religious forms of therapy and the
  sacralization of humanity

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Individualization

• Rapid social change and movement, changing
  structures of the work-place, and the
  institutional framing of people as consumers
  creates the sense of being a choosing individual
  with responsibility for ones own well-being
• Therapy and spirituality as expressions of the
  kind of resource to which people turn as
  non-authoritative guides

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The professional contexts for spirituality

• Spirituality does not have a single, consistent
  meaning
• The growth of interest in spirituality in
  specific professional/disciplinary contexts needs
  to be understood in relation to that context
  rather than assuming it to be a mere symptom of a
  broader spirituality revolution

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An open market-place of care

• Healing practices are always linked to knowledge
  claims which legitimate those practices. In a
  more open market-place of care, knowledge claims
  (including religious and secular knowledge
  claims) are more fiercely contested.

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The sacralization of humanity
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• Understanding the significance of broader social
  and cultural change, whilst avoiding simplistic
  narratives
• Attending to specific histories and meso-level
  contexts
• Seeing beyond simply conflicts between religious
  and spiritual therapy to the structures and
  changes that shape both