Chaplaincy highlights the need for faith and society to re-engage with vital moral questions. Military chaplains continue to operate within the dynamic tension between faith communities, the armed services and society, offering a distinct moral presence and contribution. Drawing the reader into the world of the military chaplain, this book explores insights into the complex moral issues that arise in combat (especially in Afghanistan), and in everyday military life, These include the the increasing significance of the Law of Armed Conflict and the moral significance of drones. Through the unique chaplain’s eye view of the significance of their experience for understanding the ethics of war, this book offers clearer understanding of chaplaincy in the context of the changing nature of international conflict (shaped around insurgency and non-state forces) and explores the response of faith communities to the role of the armed services. It makes the case for relocating understandings of just war within a theological framework and for a clear understanding of the relationship between the mission of chaplaincy and that of the military.

Chaplaincy highlights the need for faith and society to re-engage with vital moral questions. Military chaplains continue to operate within the dynamic tension between faith communities, the armed services and society, offering a distinct moral presence and contribution. Drawing the reader into the world of the military chaplain, this book explores insights into the complex moral issues that arise in combat (especially in Afghanistan), and in everyday military life, These include the the increasing significance of the Law of Armed Conflict and the moral significance of drones. Through the unique chaplain’s eye view of the significance of their experience for understanding the ethics of war, this book offers clearer understanding of chaplaincy in the context of the changing nature of international conflict (shaped around insurgency and non-state forces) and explores the response of faith communities to the role of the armed services. It makes the case for relocating understandings of just war within a theological framework and for a clear understanding of the relationship between the mission of chaplaincy and that of the military.

The Fighting Rabbis details the compelling history of Jewish military chaplains from their first service during the Civil War to the first female Jewish chaplain and the rabbinic role in Korea, Vietnam, and Desert Storm. Rabbi Slomovitz, himself a Navy chaplain, opens a window onto the fieldwork, religious services, counseling, and dramatic battlefield experiences of Jewish military chaplains throughout our nation's history.

A Handbook of Chaplaincy Studies explores fundamental issues and critical questions in chaplaincy, spanning key areas of health care, the prison service, education and military chaplaincy. Leading authors and practitioners in the field present critical insight into the challenges and opportunities facing those providing professional spiritual care. From young men and women in the military and in custody, to the bedside of those experiencing life’s greatest traumas, this critical examination of the role played by the chaplain offers a fresh and informed understanding about faith and diversity in an increasingly secular society. An invaluable compendium of case-studies, academic reflection and critical enquiry, this handbook offers a fresh understanding of traditional, contemporary and innovative forms of spiritual practice as they are witnessed in the public sphere. Providing a wide-ranging appraisal of chaplaincy in an era of religious complexity and emergent spiritualities, this pioneering book is a major contribution to a relatively underdeveloped field and sets out how the phenomenon of chaplaincy can be better understood and its practice more robust and informed.

This ground-breaking book is a guide to non-religious pastoral care practice in healthcare, prisons, education, and the armed forces in the UK. It brings a new perspective to our understanding of care services traditionally offered by chaplaincy departments. The book charts the progress from a Christian to a multi-faith and on to a fully inclusive care service. Compelling evidence is presented showing strong and broad support for non-religious pastoral care provision. A practical guide, it outlines the beliefs and values on which this care is founded and its person-centred approach. The role, skills, competencies, and training requirements for non-religious pastoral carers are described. Institutions need to consider their policy responses to the rapid development of non-religious pastoral care provision. A number of policy aspects are explored, including understanding service users’ needs, recruitment, and communications. This book is essential reading for non-religious pastoral carers and those thinking of entering this field. Chaplains and institutional managers responsible for chaplaincy or spiritual care departments will find this book gives them valuable insights into the positive contribution non-religious pastoral carers can make in building stronger, more inclusive pastoral, spiritual, and religious care services.

Far from the image of an apolitical, “clean” Wehrmacht that persists in popular memory, German soldiers regularly cooperated with organizations like the SS in the abuse and murder of countless individuals during the Second World War. This in-depth study demonstrates that a key factor in the criminalization of the Wehrmacht was the intense political indoctrination imposed on its members. At the instigation of senior leadership, many ordinary German soldiers and officers became ideological warriors who viewed their enemies in racial and political terms—a project that was but one piece of the broader effort to socialize young men during the Nazi era.

What does it mean to evangelize ethically in a multicultural climate? Following his successful Evangelism after Christendom, Bryan Stone addresses reasons evangelism often fails and explains how it can become distorted as a Christian practice. Stone urges us to consider a new approach, arguing for evangelism as a work of imagination and a witness to beauty rather than a crass effort to compete for converts in pluralistic contexts. He shows that the way we lead our lives as Christians is the most meaningful tool of evangelism in today's rapidly changing world.

Army chaplains have long played an integral part in America’s armed forces. In addition to conducting chapel activities on military installations and providing moral and spiritual support on the battlefield, they conduct memorial services for fallen soldiers, minister to survivors, offer counsel on everything from troubled marriages to military bureaucracy, and serve as families’ points of contact for wounded or deceased soldiers—all while risking the dangers of combat alongside their troops. In this thoughtful study, Anne C. Loveland examines the role of the army chaplain since World War II, revealing how the corps has evolved in the wake of cultural and religious upheaval in American society and momentous changes in U.S. strategic relations, warfare, and weaponry. From 1945 to the present, Loveland shows, army chaplains faced several crises that reshaped their roles over time. She chronicles the chaplains’ initiation of the Character Guidance program as a remedy for the soaring rate of venereal disease among soldiers in occupied Europe and Japan after World War II, as well as chaplains’ response to the challenge of increasing secularism and religious pluralism during the “culture wars” of the Vietnam Era.“Religious accommodation,” evangelism and proselytizing, public prayer, and “spiritual fitness”provoked heated controversy among chaplains as well as civilians in the ensuing decades. Then, early in the twenty-first century, chaplains themselves experienced two crisis situations: one the result of the Vietnam-era antichaplain critique, the other a consequence of increasing religious pluralism, secularization, and sectarianism within the Chaplain Corps, as well as in the army and the civilian religious community. By focusing on army chaplains’ evolving, sometimes conflict-ridden relations with military leaders and soldiers on the one hand and the civilian religious community on the other, Loveland reveals how religious trends over the past six decades have impacted the corps and, in turn, helped shape American military culture.

Chaplaincy is a rapidly growing ministry, but one that has been the centre of little theological discussion. Focusing on understanding what chaplaincy is and how it is exercised in different contexts, this book intends to support the work of chaplains by providing a theological examination of their ministry. The chapters in this book discuss how the work of chaplains outside the structures of the Church and yet frequently carried out by ministers authorized by the Church relates to some of the key questions of how the Church understands itself in relation to the world (i.e. institutions and structures that are not part of the church), whether or not the chaplains should engage in converting non-Christians to Christianity, and how chaplaincy is carried out both from within Christianity and in a multi-faith environment. This book explores the role of chaplains and the benefits of chaplaincy as a form of ministry as well as an examination of the personal characteristics and disposition best suited to serving as a chaplain. Chaplaincy and Christian Theology considers the nature of chaplaincy in public spaces and the implications of Christian theology within this ministry. Essential reading for chaplains, students of theology, and anyone involved in Christian ministry and Christian theology.

The modern ethics of war is a field of disparate, competing voices based on often unexplored theological and metaphysical assumptions. Therese Feiler approaches them from the borderline area between systematics, philosophical theology and religious studies. With reference to G. W. F. Hegel's and like-minded thinkers' 'theo–logic' that negotiates Christ's mediation and immanent dialectics, Feiler identifies the logic and problem of mediation as the core concern of political ethics. Feiler unites five representative authors from now disparate strands of contemporary just war ethics, testing whether they offer a meaningful possibility of mediation and subsequent reconciliation: a sovereign realist and a cosmopolitan idealist; a rationalist individualist, an idealist Christian ethicist, and finally, an evangelical theologian. Opening the just war debate for comparative critical engagement, Feiler creates a fascinating study that locates a “dynamic point” at which faithful, free political action can be wrestled from irony, tragedy, and melancholic inertia in the face of totalitarian suffocation.