Chaplaincy Innovation Lab

Moral injury and moral distress are enormously significant ideas in spiritual care, especially when caring for members of certain communities. What do these ideas mean? How should aspiring chaplains understand them and where they fit into career or vocation in spiritual care? This field guide session will provide an overview of moral injury and moral distress, as well as offer examples of their impact on individuals and communities.

What is chaplaincy supply and demand? For some time now, the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab has thought about what it would mean and require to build an approach to spiritual care based on both supply and demand. What does this mean?

Wendy Cadge, Founder and Director, Chaplaincy Innovation Lab

Amy Lawton, Research Manager, Chaplaincy Innovation Lab

Patients’ loved ones, who often are acting as surrogate decision makers, are among the unique aspects of spiritual care in intensive care settings. In a study conducted at the Regenstrief Institute and Indiana University School of Medicine from 2018 to 2021, a research team found that proactive spiritual care offered to ICU surrogates improves their well-being. These findings also provide evidence for the inclusion of chaplains in palliative and intensive care teams.

Chaplains provide spiritual care to anyone and everyone. This can mean accompanying those with whom the chaplain may have profound spiritual, religious, political, cultural, or other differences. What is the “radical acceptance” required to provide meaningful spiritual care, and how can aspiring chaplains begin preparing themselves for this crucial, but often quite difficult, aspect of the work?

Tahara Akmal is Clinical Pastoral Education Manager at MedStar Washington Hospital Center in Washington, DC.

Jason Callahan is an instructor in the Department of Patient Counseling, College of Health Professions, and chaplain for the Thomas Palliative Care Unit in Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center.

How can spiritual care providers, including those in healthcare, best serve those with eating disorders? The Lab welcomes Emily Boring, biologist, Yale Divinity Student, and previous chaplain intern to discuss the complex relationship between spirituality, spiritual care, and eating disorders. We’ll learn about how chaplains can best accompany those experiencing eating disorders and disordered eating, how chaplains can integrate their own experiences of illness into their care of others, and the relationship between nourishing the body and caring for the spirit.

You can read her article “What the body means to say” at The Atlantic.

Emily Boring writes and works at the intersection of science, medicine, and spirituality. A native of Oregon, she earned her B.S. in Ecology and Evolution from Yale and her MSc in marine ecology from Oregon State University. She currently studies religion and literature through the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale Divinity School (MAR ’23).

Emily’s creative nonfiction has appeared in publications such as The Christian Century, Yale Distilled, and The Atlantic. In the field of eating disorders, she combines research and personal experience through essays for the FEAST blog, podcasts, conference talks, and one-on-one mentoring of adolescents.

Emily is a postulant for ordination in the Episcopal Church (Diocese of Oregon). She completed her ACPE Level I chaplaincy internship in summer 2021.

Lab community saves 25% off Ellen Cooney’s book with code ONENIGHT25 through March 14, 2023. Order at http://bit.ly/3JqRR55.

Join the Lab for a conversation with the author of this novel centered on the work of a chaplain and informed by Cooney’s life. From the publisher: “I believe in expecting light. That’s my job.” A hospital chaplain offers compassion to her patients over the course of an eventful night shift, and finds some for herself, too. The young interfaith chaplain is joined on her hospital rounds one night by an unusual companion: a rough-and-tumble dog who may or may not be a ghost. As she tends to the souls of her patients—young and old, living last moments or navigating fundamentally altered lives—their stories provide unexpected healing for her own heartbreak. Balancing wonder and mystery with pragmatism and humor, Ellen Cooney has written a generous, intelligent novel that grants the most challenging moments of the human experience a shimmer of light and magical possibility.

Ellen Cooney was born in Clinton, Massachusetts in 1952. She is the author of ten novels, most recently One Night Two Souls Went Walking. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Literary Review, New England Review, and many other journals, and were listed several times in Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. Now retired from over twenty-five years of teaching, she was a writer in residence at MIT, and also taught classes and workshops at Boston College, Harvard Extension School, the Seminars at Radcliffe, and Northeastern University, and as visiting writer at Holy Cross College and the University of Maine at Farmington. She left Massachusetts for midcoast Maine at the time of her teaching retirement, and writes full-time at her home on the Phippsburg peninsula. Her new novel, A Cowardly Woman No More, will be published in April by Coffee House Press.

The Field Guide for Aspiring Chaplains series is intended to offer a basic introduction to the profession of chaplaincy, from education and training through to practice. Each session includes an in-depth conversation with spiritual care practitioners on topics of key importance to those considering careers in chaplaincy; there are also opportunities for small-group discussion afterward (not recorded).

You can view recordings from previous sessions below. Those interested in our Field Guide series should also download our free eBook Beginner’s Guide to Spiritual Care, now available here.

This session offers an overview of the fundamentals of CPE, addressing such issues as:

-What is clinical pastoral education (CPE)?

We are joined by:

Danielle Buhuor, Founder and Director, Sankofa CPE

Mychal Springer, Manager of Clinical Pastoral Education, New York-Presbyterian Hospital

This information session is offered to assist those interested in applying for a demonstration project grant for creative, evidence-based ways Jewish chaplains can meet the demand for innovative spiritual and emotional support for people not well served in the contemporary landscape. We particularly encourage applications related to the work of community chaplaincy – a distinctive contribution of Jewish chaplains – as well as from leaders in organizations and settings that have not traditionally seen the work of Jewish chaplains as central to their mission.

Four grants of $40,000 will be awarded for work to be completed between July 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024. Each project team will be supported by an experienced mentor who has demonstrated success integrating chaplaincy in new ways into new settings. These mentors will work closely with project teams for the duration of their grants to ensure the success and ongoing viability of their interventions.

Applications must come from existing 501(c)(3) organizations and must include an executive or other high level organizational leader and a Jewish chaplain on the project team. We seek to fund efforts that have the highest likelihood of success during the grant period as well as the strongest possibility of continuing once the funding ends. We will also privilege projects that have the capacity to be scaled.

This information session is offered for interested and prospective applicants to ask whatever questions they may have about the process. Those interested in applying should read more here. We are joined by:

Wendy Cadge, Chaplaincy Innovation Lab

Grace Last, Chaplaincy Innovation Lab

Michael Skaggs, Chaplaincy Innovation Lab

Mychal Springer, New York-Presbyterian Hospital

We thank the Charles H. Revson Foundation for their support of this work.

Twenty-five years ago, the Center for Disease Control discovered 10 “Adverse Childhood Experiences” that if they occurred before the age of 18 potentially has long lasting impacts on one’s psychological and physical health. In this presentation Dr. Eric M. Brown of Boston University will provide a framework for understanding how early experiences can have long lasting impacts on adult development. Furthermore, he will provide information on ways that faith leaders can serve those suffering from psychological and emotional distress as a result of adversity early in life.  The Trauma Responsive Congregations Project, based at Boston University School of Theology, is sponsored by Lilly Endowment, Inc.

More and more chaplains are seeking hospice chaplaincy jobs in this quickly growing field of spiritual care. The Field Guide for Aspiring Chaplains series is intended to offer a basic introduction to the profession of chaplaincy, from education and training through to practice. Each session includes an in-depth conversation with spiritual care practitioners on topics of key importance to those considering careers in chaplaincy; there are also opportunities for small-group discussion afterward (not recorded). Those interested in our Field Guide series should also download our free eBook Beginner’s Guide to Spiritual Care, available here: https://chaplaincyinnovation.org/resources/ebooks.  This session is titled "Hospice chaplaincy: Breaking in to this high-demand field." 

We are joined by:  

We thank our sponsors for this session of the Field Guide series: