The pastoral ministry doesn't have the social clout it used to, but it's hardly alone. "Vocations of judgment," as we term them in this episode, are under siege everywhere, as the understandable suspicion of human fallibility leads more and more to an outsourcing of human judgment to regulations, bureaucracy, and AI. We hope you'll agree that this is hardly an improvement. In this episode, we try to get a handle on the problem across the vocations, then zero in on what exactly does (and does not) constitute pastoral authority, hoping in the process to encourage and embolden besieged pastors with the true strength of their calling.

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Notes:

1. Related episodes are: What Is (Not) the Job of a Pastor?; How to Be a Congregation; Hannah Arendt

2. My new book, which also discusses pastoral authority, is To Baptize or Not to Baptize: A Practical Guide for Clergy, new from Thornbush Press!

3. Kant, Critique of Judgement

4. Critical fiction of the bureaucratic and machine era: just about anything by Kafka, the film "Brazil," and the Matrix trilogy.

5. Dad's essay "Complicity and the Christological Path of Ecclesial Resistance: Summons to a New Catechesis for a Time of Despair" appears in Truth-Telling and Other Ecclesial Practices of Resistance, ed. Christine Helmer

6. Vaclav Havel, "The Power of the Powerless"

7. A particularly good read on pastoral ministry is Eugene Peterson's The Pastor

8. And if you by chance are on Twitter, see if you can make #judiciousness go viral!

More about us at sarahhinlickywilson.com and paulhinlicky.com!