TY - JOUR

T1 - Belonging to the World through Body, Trust, and Trinity

T2 - Climate Change and Pastoral Care with University Students

AU - Johannessen, Christine Tind

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - 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”.

AB - 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”.

KW - climate change

KW - ethnography

KW - feminist theology

KW - in-depth interview

KW - mentalizing

KW - pastoral care

KW - psychological stress

KW - sustainability

KW - the new climatic regime

KW - trinity

KW - university students

U2 - 10.3390/rel13060527

DO - 10.3390/rel13060527

M3 - Journal article

AN - SCOPUS:85132554211

VL - 13

JO - Religions

JF - Religions

SN - 2077-1444

IS - 6

M1 - 527

ER -