Lexington Books / Fortress Academic
Pages: 216
•
Trim: 6⅜ x 9
978-1-9787-0177-9 • Hardback • December 2019 • $117.00 • (£90.00)
Leah R. Thomas is visiting professor of pastoral theology at Lancaster Theological Seminary.
1 Psychiatric Diagnosis and Pastoral Care: An Overlapping and Interrelated History
2 The Voices of Chaplains: Seeing the “Whole Person”
3 The Voices of Chaplains: Practices of Assessment
4 An Alternative to a Diagnosis-Focused Approach: Just Care
Leah R. Thomas's work brings the experimental and experiential together, yielding an insightful, new ethical approach to respond to racial and gender disparities in pastoral care. Her commitment to center chaplaincy work with and for women of color uncovers biases inherent to psychiatric diagnosis, care, and healing. Just Care is Christian Social Ethics at its best as it richly describes, attentively analyzes, and concretely transforms pastoral practices toward justice infused practices of care.
— Kate Ott, Drew University
Drawing on open-ended interviews and years of chaplaincy, this book addresses one of the toughest questions in the spiritual care of women—how to affect genuine healing of mental illness that accounts for a woman’s faith and the realities of patriarchy and racism amid a highly medicalized diagnostically-oriented world. Leah Thomas’s answers fill a serious gap in feminist and womanist research while also offering wonderfully concrete suggestions for transforming care in psychiatric institutions.
— Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, Vanderbilt University
Thomas reveals exciting strategies for antiracist thinking and doing by pastoral care providers that departs from the more common individualistic mode that is indifferent to the pervasiveness of white supremacy. Just Care’s distinctively liberationist approach to pastoral care for some of the most vulnerable within psychiatric institutions is conveyed with gripping, sometimes startling, narratives and detailed ethical analysis. With clarity and uncanny timeliness, Thomas broadens the horizon of urgency about the plight of state institutionalized women of color, awakening readers to the crucial role of chaplains and providing innovative suggestions for more just modes of intervention and support.
— Traci C. West, Drew University Theological School