Spirituality and Secularism in Professional Chaplaincy: On the Social Construction of Meaning

 

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Spirituality and Secularism in Professional Chaplaincy: 

On the Social Construction of Meaning

by Jamie Duncan, May 23, 2013

Introduction

According to the Association of Professional Chaplains, the professional clinical chaplain’s primary role in a hospital setting is to protect the patient’s rights, serving “as an advocate for the spiritual values and religious beliefs held by the patient, even when those values and beliefs are not those of the chaplain.”¹ In “The Dechristianization of Christian Hospital Chaplaincy: Some Bioethics Reflections on Professionalization, Ecumenization, and Secularization,” H. Tristram Engelhardt, professor of philosophy at Rice University, criticizes clinical chaplaincy as a “secular” profession, arguing that “once chaplaincy is defined by fully ecumenical professional norms, justifiable within the public discourse of a secular public space, chaplaincy takes on an identity independent of and hostile to traditional Christian concerns.”²

According to a consensus document written by representatives of the five largest healthcare chaplaincies in North America, “The Joint Commission on the Association of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO, 1998) in the U.S. states, ‘patients have a fundamental right to considerate care that safeguards their personal dignity and respects their cultural, psychosocial, and spiritual values.'”³ JCAHO (now simply called The Joint Commission) is a non-profit healthcare accreditation organization founded on the principles of Ernest Amory Codman, a native of Boston and early 20th century pioneer in standardized healthcare procedures.⁴ The document further explains that spirituality “describes an awareness of relationships with all creation, an appreciation of presence and purpose that includes a sense of meaning. Though not true generations ago, a distinction is frequently made between spirituality and religion, the latter focusing on defined structures, rituals and doctrines.”³ Mark J. Cherry, a professor of applied ethics at St. Edwards University in Austin Texas, reframes this perspective in his article “Foundations of the Culture Wars: Compassion, Love, and Human Dignity”:  “Institutional practice and governmental policy is ever more embracing and coercively enforcing such a fully secularized understanding of religion and culture, in which the search for meaning is fully individualized, all spirituality is generic and interchangeable, and all cultures, practices and religions affirmed as equally good.”⁵

Clinical chaplaincy developed primarily in Boston, guided by liberal Protestants who were interested in the global unification of religions and in a productive relationship between science and faith. Nearly a hundred years later, professional chaplaincy is a nondenominational clinical field accredited by healthcare organizations. Religious supporters of professional chaplaincy hearken to its roots of ecumenism and experimentation in theologically centered therapy. Literature produced by the accreditation organizations focus on patient autonomy, bioethical policies and spirituality as a universal human experience. Critics define professional chaplaincy and spirituality as “generic” and characterize ecumenism as “secularism.” Wary of institutional authority and government policies that ostensibly promote and normalize the secular acceptance of all beliefs in a pluralistic society, these authors appeal to a “traditional” Christianity in which chaplains were to be “in the world, but not of the world.”⁶

Despite accusations that professional chaplaincy has embraced standardization and acceptance of diversity to the point of irreligiosity, these organizations require seminary education for all applicants. Professional chaplains retain a definitive theology and defer to a particular denominational authority. The development of professional chaplaincy reflects its affiliation with the nation’s healthcare system in general, which followed a similar path from Christian charity to institutionalization. Consequently, criticism of healthcare chaplaincy mirrors that of liberal Christians in general and Christian healthcare professionals in particular. As Pamela E. Klassen explains, “Beyond the sphere of healing, twentieth-century liberal Protestants are often characterized by their conservative critics, as well as by scholars, as the most secular of modern Christians, and the very personification of Max Weber’s notion of disenchantment.”  In reality, she says, the tenets of the Social Gospel movement compelled liberal Protestants to help establish hospitals, universities and nongovernmental organizations while simultaneously embracing a belief in divine intervention. “Their supernaturalism was bred of habits of prayer, convictions that spiritual energies coursed through the universe and the body, and for some, a hope that all religions offered paths, via rituals and spiritual exercises, to these universal truths.”⁷ When reviewing the chaplaincy literature in light of the broader criticism of liberal Protestantism, it becomes clear that “spirituality” is the theological goal of ecumenism and “secularization theory” is a methodological fallacy.⁸

In this paper, I will explore the liberal Protestant origins of professional chaplaincy and the eventuation of “spirituality” as an expression of ecumenical goals. Spirituality has been a difficult subject for the academy to take seriously, often viewed as “‘pie in the sky’ stuff” according to Kathryn Lofton. She says, “Especially because participants in spirituality culture are often educated members of the bourgeoisie, spirituality has seemed like some adolescent rebellion against the disciplined logic of secularization.”⁹ As a result, religious scholars tend to ignore the claims of those who define themselves as “spiritual,” and impose other categories upon them.

Following this survey of clinical chaplaincy’s history, I will demonstrate how the term “secular” is used by critics of professional chaplaincy as a clandestine accusation of having the “wrong” religion. Critics of professional chaplaincy overtly express this accusation, often characterizing professional chaplaincy as divorcing its practice from the authority of a “traditional” Christianity.

An investigation into how “spirituality” and “secularism” are used in the literature concerning professional chaplaincy contributes to the understanding of broader trends in the academic research of contemporary religion. As Jeremy Carrette and Richard King explained in Selling Spirituality, when considering a word like spirituality, “it is important to understand its ‘use’ rather than its ‘meaning’, or, to recall Foucault, we must consider the relations of power the word sets up rather than what it means.”¹⁰ This paper will explore how the words “spirituality” and “secularism” are used in the chaplaincy literature and what relationship this literature may have to broader scholarship on liberal Protestantism.

Spirituality

At the turn of the 20th century, some liberal Protestant leaders were involved in global ecumenical movements such as the World’s Parliament of Religions and the Interchurch World Movement. Industrial philanthropists and political progressives embraced the Social Gospel movement, helping to transform the ideals into public policy and institutional reform. And liberal Protestants en masse found themselves forced to adapt theologically to a changing world dominated by globalization, industrialization, and scientific advancement. Liberal Protestants helped shape the institutions of education, healthcare and public policy as a matter of religious duty.¹¹ The Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) movement began in this era of burgeoning ecumenism, social activism and scientific inquiry.

Two men from the Boston area, Dr. Richard C. Cabot and Anton Boisen, are credited with the early development of what would eventually become professional clinical chaplaincy. Cabot, a Transcendentalist, served as the chief of medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital beginning in 1912. During that period, he became involved with the Emmanuel Movement in Boston, founded by Episcopal priests Elwood Worcester and Samuel McComb to incorporate Christian healing practices into the field of psychotherapy. Cabot served as a public advocate, medical advisor and occasional guest speaker to the weekly “health conferences,” a precursor to group therapy sessions incorporating non-denominational lectures, hymns and prayers.¹²

Worcester traced the spirit to the subconscious as a source for spiritual healing, providing a theological interpretation of psychology from a New Thought perspective. However, critics numbered among the movement’s own allies, such as psychiatrist Isador Coriat, who “warned against mystifications of the psyche” and author Joshua Roth Liebman, who admonished their portrayal of a “spiritualized psyche.”¹³ Harsher critics included Dr. Clarence Farrar, a vocal opponent of Spiritualism, who warned that doctors involved in the Emmanuel Movement would “hand over impotently to clergy for treatment, certain conditions which are just as truly the manifestations of disease or trauma as would be a broken limb or febrile delirium.”¹⁴

Cabot himself maintained public support of the program, although he “counseled Worcester against taking on psychiatric cases because of his lack of medical training.”¹⁵ In 1925, Cabot founded the first program of supervised pastoral training within a medical institution, based on medical residency programs.¹⁶ In 1936, he coauthored with Presbyterian minister Russell Dicks a popular book, The Art of Ministering to the Sick, focused on the “usefulness of Protestant ministers who could ‘counteract the evils of [medical] specialism’ by offering ‘glimpses of the whole.'”¹⁵

Cabot’s relationship with the Emmanuel Movement is a good example of the broader tension between Christians and scientific medicine:

Whereas some commentators contended that psychoanalysis could render Christian healing “sane and scientific” and that Christianity could bestow on psychology a spiritually informed vision of the “world of psycho-physical facts,” those with “New Thought” or Pentecostal leanings were not as dedicated to a biomedical worldview. Their different relationships to biomedical authority led to bitter division between Protestants committed to a supernatural liberalism that valued an equilibrium between science and the spirit and those who were skeptical of biomedicine and thought that spirit trumped science—a division that would continue to shape Anglican and United Church communities throughout the century. For proponents of divine healing in particular, science-friendly Christians had lost their ability to see the hand of God at work in the body and had become trapped in “naturalistic empiricism.” Supporters of the scientific spirit, however, found the claims of divine healing profoundly suspicious exactly because their proof lay in personal stories and not in scientifically documented testimony.¹⁷

Anton T. Boisen represented one of chaplaincy’s bridges between scientific inquiry and experiential case study. Born in Indiana in 1876, Boisen was raised in a moderate Presbyterian Church by “a progressive woman for that time”; and at Indiana University, his favorite professor introduced him to the work of William James, which would have a profound impact on his future career.¹⁸ Boisen studied psychology and graduated from Union Theological Seminary in 1911, ordained a Presbyterian minister. In subsequent years, he converted to the Congregational Church, participated in the Interchurch World Movement until its demise in 1920, and suffered a series of psychological breakdowns.¹⁹ In 1920, he met Dr. Cabot at Andover Theological Seminary, where Cabot was teaching a course on the clinical case method for social work in a hospital setting.¹⁸

Influenced by Cabot’s plan for seminary students to receive one year of supervised experience in a medical setting as training for pastoral counseling, Boisen set up a chaplaincy program in Worcester State Hospital, a Massachusetts state mental hospital, in 1925. Cabot founded the first CPE program at Massachusetts General Hospital that same year. Although Cabot’s program developed into the Institute for Pastoral Care in 1944, Boisen’s unique expansion of the case study method proved to have a greater impact. Believing psychosis to be the mind’s attempt to solve problems of the soul, he referred to his work as reading “the living human documents” to study human experience theologically:

Theology may best be regarded as the cooperative attempt to organize religious experience by scrutinizing religious beliefs and inquiring into the origin, meaning, and consequences of these beliefs. It is assumed in this definition that religious experience is the sensation of fellowship raised to its highest level, a bonding with God and a genuine compassion for the well being of all humankind.¹⁸

 

The purpose of this case study method, from Boisen’s perspective, was to teach seminary students to “reflect systematically about the human condition, both psychological and theological,”¹⁸ in order to understand the religious experience underlying the patient’s illness. Boisen’s greatest contribution to the CPE movement was “narrative theology,” the focus on narrative as a structure for meaning and central to the Christian experience. His “living human document” case studies combined patient interviews into narrative form to illuminate underlying theological concerns.¹⁸

In 1930, Dr. Cabot parted ways with Boisen and his other partners in the burgeoning Institute for Pastoral Care, repudiating claims that mental illness was the result of an underlying religious crisis. Specifically, he condemned Boisen’s claim that “a breakthrough had occurred between the science of medicine and humanity of the religious.”¹⁸

That same year, Pastor Samuel Eliot of the Unitarian Church of Boston established the first CPE organization, the Clinical Training of Theological Students, which later moved to New York City. By the 1940s, this organization also experienced a rift of methodological differences, led by Seward Hiltner on one side and Robert Brinkman on the other. Hiltner, trained in Boisen’s first class of chaplaincy supervisors, served as director from 1935 to 1938 and emphasized “theological reflection about human experience.”¹⁹ A protégé of Paul Tillich, Hiltner argued for stronger relationships between psychoanalysis and Protestant theology. The Greek word “psyche,” he said, referred to “the personality as mind, soul or spirit,” and stressed the Christian’s duty to administer to the “whole body” in medicine, part of the greater project of salvation. Hiltner’s relationship with Tillich provided public validation for his theological perspective on pastoral counseling.²⁰

Brinkman led the group from 1939 until 1946, downplaying theology to focus on scientific methodology and clinical psychology. According the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education (ACPE), currently the largest professional chaplaincy accreditation organization, Hiltner’s approach has dominated the subsequent development of the CPE movement, although elements of Brinkman’s methodology remain influential.¹⁹

ACPE was formed in 1967, combining the Council for Clinical Training of Theological Students, the Institute of Pastoral Care, Inc., the Lutheran Advisory Council on Pastoral Care, and the Southern Baptist Association of Clinical Pastoral Education, establishing “the standard setting, accrediting and certifying resource agency in the field of clinical pastoral education.”²¹ Because churches tended to abandon clergy who entered chaplaincy programs as having “left the ministry,” the establishment of the interdenominational chaplaincy organization is said to have contributed to the growing sense of ecumenical companionship among chaplains.²²

Over time, clinical chaplaincy further divorced from any denominational roots, stressing clinical standardization. For instance, Rev. Russell Dicks, coauthor of The Art of Ministering to the Sick, founded the Association of Protestant Hospital Chaplains in 1946. By the 1970s, the organization had begun pursuing certification from the Commission for Hospital Accreditation. Once approved, hospitals were compelled to provide for the “spiritual needs” of patients, leading to Medicare reimbursement for chaplaincy services. By the mid-1990s, APHC merged with other chaplaincy organizations to become the nondenominational Association of Professional Chaplains and one of the organizations, College of Chaplains, split from parent group APHA in order to provide professional accreditation fully divorced from Protestant theology as an exclusive restraint in accreditation.²³ Although this description may seem to match the critical interpretation of modern professional chaplaincy as “generic,” the goal of this organization is to provide accreditation to individuals of any theological background, responding to the reality of cultural pluralism.

What objectively may appear as universalism is merely ecumenism in a professional setting: various Protestant denominations putting aside theological differences for a common goal within a profession that bridges the gap between religion and science. As shown above, the focus on a clinical validation for professional chaplaincy finds its roots in the popular book Dicks and Cabot authored together in 1936, just a few years after the first professional chaplaincy organization, the Clinical Training of Theological Students, was established in Boston. Clinical chaplaincy began as a medical view of theology with Cabot and a theological view of psychology with Boisen in the 1920s. That tension contributed to its continuing development within the context of liberal Protestantism’s broader influence on the health care industry. For instance, the belief that healing could be achieved by balancing the needs of the “body, mind and spirit”²⁴ provided a clinical role for chaplaincy, which caters to the “spirit” of the individual without imposing a theological perspective. The liberal Protestant ethos of ecumenism has developed into professional universalism, so that each individual’s belief (or nonbelief) is respected and individuals of any belief system may be accredited. As such, “religion” is defined as the localized product of multicultural pluralism, defined in contrast to that universal spirit which is believed to exist within every individual.²⁵ “Spirituality” is not a belief system divorced from liberal Protestantism, but rather results from a century of theological inquiry based on the ecumenical tenets of the Social Gospel movement.

Secularism

In a previous paper, I surveyed nearly thirty articles engaged in the theological concerns of professional chaplaincy, organized as “ecumenical” and “exclusivist” perspectives, according to use of the terms by the authors. The ecumenical authors were largely theologians and chaplains, while the exclusivists were primarily professors of philosophy and bioethics. And while the ecumenical authors stressed tolerance for cultural pluralism in a clinical setting, the scholars of philosophy accused professional chaplaincy of irreligiosity in the from of “secularism.”

For instance, Christopher Tollefsen, professor of philosophy at University of South Carolina, argues that professional chaplains are subject to the authority of institutional policy, producing a “generic” clinical position beholden to the “individual relativism” of postmodernism, which renders all forms of authority as equally valid. He accuses professional chaplains of devaluing religious worship, promoting instead a meta-God, “a single being which is the source of all the various, and mutually incompatible creeds of the various religions.”²⁶ In a secular setting, he says, the professional chaplain’s true responsibility is to maintain the social order of the institution.

Engelhardt, a professor of philosophy and bioethics at Rice University, decried the “deChristianization” of both hospitals and the chaplaincy profession. He argues that there is now a schism between “the traditional Christian health care institution” which openly expressed “the recognition that the most important metaphysical and moral truth is the Incarnation, the good news of which the institution should attempt with all its energy to bring to all that it encounters” and the “post-traditional Christian health care institution,”²⁷ which is primarily concerned with social justice, “attempting to provide quality care to its patients, respect human dignity, and realize a preferential concern for the poor and the undeserved, insofar as resources permit, all within a moral language accessible to all.”²⁸ Regarding chaplains, he characterizes the “traditional Christian hospital chaplain” as protecting Christian values in a public space, primarily responsible for proselytizing “right belief” to the ill and dying.²⁹As he explains:

Those who do not acknowledge this threat to the authentic Christian identity of chaplains likely hold that the emerging profession of chaplaincy can embrace numerous religious narratives and accounts of spirituality without imposing one of its own. Yet, compassing a plurality of spiritualities in a secular-ecumenical unity threatens to discount the unique truth of the Christian message within a polytheism of religious perspectives and a post-modern plurality of moral and spiritual narratives, none of which is to announce itself publicly as the true and factually universal story of Creation, Incarnation and Redemption.³⁰

 

Not only does this characterization of professional chaplaincy contradict the known history of its development and the stated goals of its accreditation organizations, the author deliberately equates theological ecumenism with secularism, accusing liberal theology of irreligiosity. His own particular theological perspective (stated as Eastern Orthodox in his biography) engenders the exclusivity of “right religion,” while professional chaplaincy is characterized as devoid of religious validity. The other exclusivist authors made similar claims, accusing professional chaplaincy, with its mainline liberal Protestant history, of being “generic” or “secular” and divergent from its intended “traditional” Christian roots. This tradition included conservative Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox theological perspectives, a history not documented by the chaplaincy organizations.

The characterization of professional chaplaincy as secular is indicative of trends Klassen identifies in scholarly criticism of liberal Protestantism in general: “Interpretations of secularization as the decline of liberal Protestantism are often themselves predicated on unarticulated notions of what counts as “pure” Christianity.”³¹ As liberal Protestantism has declined in influence, narrow definitions of legitimacy have become dominate. After all, we have shown that the tradition of professional chaplaincy began with liberal mainline Protestants guided by the Social Gospel movement and an interest in the intersection between science and faith, developing into ecumenical and culturally tolerant non-denominational clinical work in which the word “spirituality” bears a theological genealogy. The roots of clinical chaplaincy date to a period when northern mainline Protestant churches dominated Christian perspectives in the United States.

The use of “secularism” as a criticism of professional chaplaincy is an attempt to discredit the entire profession by pitting the pastoral origins of the occupation against a contemporary understanding of religious separation. The word “secular” is often used to describe institutions of shared public space, such as hospitals, schools and the government, as separate from clearly defined religious institutions such as denominations and structures with names like “Baptist” and “synagogue.” Defining religion in this way restricts legitimacy to objectively identifiable institutions and practices, as separate from all other aspects of daily life. Defining professional chaplaincy as “secular” categorizes it as disconnected from theological origins within the “right” religious institutions.

But, as Lofton points out, “The secular is not an absence of religion; rather, the secular is religion’s kaleidoscopic buffet.”³² These institutions are not irreligious at all. Hospitals and schools exist largely because of the “cultural weight” of American Protestants who cultivated and granted authority to these institutions as part of the Social Gospel movement.³³ Further, the so-called “culture wars” are proof enough that these institutions are ground zero for religious conflict, and not devoid of theology at all. In fact, a small portion of the world population self-identifies as atheist, so institutions as social organizations are necessarily composed of people with diverse cultural backgrounds that include various religious beliefs. For example, 99% of the current Congress reports a religious affiliation;³⁴ as a social institution, Congress cannot be described as irreligious. In terms of shared public space, secularism more accurately connotes cultural pluralism than a lack of religiosity, because social organizations cannot be divorced from the plethora of beliefs embraced by its diverse population. If “secularism” more accurately signifies religious pluralism than a lack of religiosity, then it bears a strong resemblance to professional chaplaincy’s ethos of ecumenism, embodied in the theology of “spirituality.”

The word “secular” retains connotations of irreligiosity, however, as if certain institutions could be divorced from the behavior of the people within. Equating ecumenism and spirituality with secularism automatically frames the discussion so that professional chaplaincy is understood to be theologically fraudulent. This, in turn, offers the critic’s perspective as the legitimate theology.³⁵ “Secular” is a term of discussion for which there is no material corollary, because social institutions devoid of human belief cannot exist. It is a floating signifier,³⁶ meaning that its objective meaning depends on the context of its delivery and the meaning imposed by the speaker. Thus, the charge of “secularism” in this context actually implies a criticism that “spirituality” is the wrong religion, and that charge is possible because of the fluid meanings of both “spirituality” and “secularism.” Proponents and critics of professional chaplaincy frame the profession similarly, but with socially divergent connotations engendered by the unstable terms they employ.

Conclusion

A close look at the history of professional chaplaincy reveals its inseparability from liberal Protestantism’s firm relationship with the development of modern medicine. Scholarly critique has largely focused on institutional religion, with its tax-exempt structures and by-laws, as “right religion,” attempting to define perfect delineated borders between the secular and the religious. Portraying religion in such an exclusive manner allows scholars to categorize other forms of religion as “secularized.” As Pamela Klassen has argued, this characterization is “based on scornful stereotypes of the ‘belief-based’ Protestant, and thus miss[ed] the opportunity to consider the energetic and complicated ways that liberal Protestants practiced their own modern supernaturalism in the midst of their love of science.”³⁷ Clearly, the history of professional chaplaincy might serve as a microcosm for understanding the broader relationships at work within the study of liberal Protestantism and its critics.

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1. APC Board of Directors, “Guidelines for the Chaplain’s Role in Health Care Ethics,” ed. Association of Professional Chaplains, (Schaumburg, IL, 2000), 2.
2. H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., “The Dechristianization of Christian Hospital Chaplaincy: Some Bioethics Reflections on Professionalization, Ecumenization, and Secularization,” Christian Bioethics, 2003, 140.
3. “Professional Chaplaincy: Its Role and Importance in Healthcare,” ed. Larry VandeCreek and Laurel Burton, The Journal of Pastoral Care55 (2001): 82.
4. Richard A. Brand, M.D., “Ernest Amory Codman, MD, 1869-1940”, US National Library of Medicine-National Institutes of Health, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2758958/ (accessed May 1 2013).
5. Mark J. Cherry, “Foundations of the Culture Wars: Compassion, Love, and Human Dignity,” Christian Bioethics7 (2001):  307.
6. Rev. Fr. Thomas Joseph, “Secular Vs. Orthodox Chaplaincy: Taking the Kingdom of Heaven Seriously,” Christian Bioethics, 1998, 277.
7. Pamela E. Klassen, Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (The Anthropology of Christianity),(London: University of California Press, 2011), 5.
8. Chad E. Seales, “Corporate Chaplains and the American Workplace,” Religion Compass, 2012, 201.
9. Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon(London: University of California Press, 2011), 58.
10. Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion(New York: Routledge, 2005), 30.
11. Klassen, Spirits of Protestantism, 13.
12. Elwood Worcester, Isador Coriat, Samuel McComb, Religion and Medicine: The Moral Control of Nervous Disorders(New York: Moffat, Yard & Company, 1908), 2.
13. Klassen, Spirits of Protestantism, 46.
14. Clarence Farrar, “Psychotherapy and the Church,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 1908, 24.
15. Klassen, Spirits of Protestantism, 47.
16. “ACPE Standards & Manuals,” edited by Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, Inc. Decatur, GA, 2010, ii.
17. Klassen, Spirits of Protestantism, 82-83.
18. Rev. Robert Leas, “Anton Theophilus Boisen”, The Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, Inc., http://www.acpe.edu/networks/boisen_bio.htm (accessed May 6 2013).
19. John Rea Thomas and Robert D. Leas, “ACPE History Corner”, The Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, Inc., http://www.acpe.edu/cpehistory.htm (accessed April 5, 2013).
20. Klassen, Spirits of Protestantism, 158-159.
21. “ACPE Standards & Manuals,” ii.
22. John Rea Thomas, BA, BD, MA, “A History of ‘Clinical Training,’ 41-42.
23. “A Brief History of the Association of Professional Chaplains”,  http://www.professionalchaplains.org/content.asp?pl=24&sl=31&contentid=31 (accessed April 8, 2013).
24. Klassen, Spirits of Protestantism, 48.
25. Rev. James C. Johnson, M.Div., “An Introduction to Health Care Chaplaincy,” In Navigating the Maze of Professional Relationships: Parish Nurses, Health Care Chaplains, and Community Clergy, ed. DMin and Sue Mooney Larry VandeCreek, BSN. (Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press: 2002), 2.
26. Christopher Tollefsen, “Meta Ain’t Always Betta’: Conceptualizing the Generic Chaplaincy Issue,” Christian Bioethics, 1998, 308.
27. H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., “The Dechristianization of Christian Health Care Institutions, or, How the Pursuit of Social Justice and Excellence Can Obscure the Pursuit of Holiness,” Christian Bioethics7 (2001): 152.
28. Engelhardt, Jr., “The Dechristianization of Christian Health Care Institutions,” Christian Bioethics, 153.
29. Engelhardt, Jr., “The Dechristianization of Christian Hospital Chaplaincy,” Christian Bioethics,139.
30. Engelhardt, Jr., “The Dechristianization of Christian Hospital Chaplaincy,” Christian Bioethics,140.
31. Klassen, Spirits of Liberal Protestantism, 17.
32. Lofton, Oprah, 209.
33. Klassen, Spirits of Liberal Protestantism, 14.
34. Jennifer E. Manning, “Membership of the 112th Congress: A Profile”, Congressional Research Service http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/R41647.pdf (accessed May 6 2013), 5.
35. George Lakoff, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate-The Essential Guide for Progressives(White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishers, 2004).
36. Jeffrey Mehlman, “The ‘Floating Signifier’: From Levi-Strauss to Lacan,” Yale French Studies, 1972, 11.
37. Klassen, Spirits of Protestantism, vii.

 

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