Walhout’s starting point is a close reading of how the word radicalization actually functions, both in popular discourse and in the academic literature. In public debate, the term tends to carry an implicit geography: there is assumed to be a reasonable political center, and radicalization describes movement away from it toward the extremes. Scholars of extremism have long noted the analytical difficulties with this framing. Work by researchers such as Donatella della Porta, Stefan Malthaner, and Kylie McDonald has emphasized that radicalization is better seen as a relational and evolving process than as a linear march from moderation to violence. Walhout pushes this critique further, suggesting that the field should stop measuring radical beliefs against an imagined political midpoint altogether.

Instead, he proposes a different yardstick. What matters, in his account, is not where an individual lands on a left-right spectrum but the nature and degree to which that person seeks to radically transform the self. Radicalization, on this view, is primarily an inwardly focused undertaking, a campaign to remake one’s own identity, even when it borrows the language of political struggle. This inversion has practical consequences: if the driving engine is internal rather than ideological, then interventions aimed purely at countering extremist ideas may be addressing the surface of the problem while leaving its psychological core untouched.

The engine of that internal drive, Walhout argues, is an internalized sense of failure, often entangled with humiliation. His argument draws on a body of scholarship that connects violent extremism with wounded masculinity. Michael Kimmel’s research on how young men enter and exit violent extremist movements, and more recent work by Lucas Gottzén on remasculinization as both an individual and a political project, suggests that extremist movements can offer aggrieved men a kind of restoration: a story in which personal failure is reframed as collective victimhood and violence becomes a route to recovered status. Studies of humiliation as a self-conscious emotion likewise document how profoundly it can reorganize a person’s sense of self and social worth.

To give this inward transformation a conceptual vocabulary, Walhout reaches back more than a century, to William James’s classic 1902 lectures published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. James, the Harvard psychologist and philosopher, treated conversion not as a niche theological event but as a general psychological process: the divided self, torn by guilt, failure, and inner conflict, undergoes a sudden or gradual unification around a new center of energy. What was once sick and fragmented becomes whole, and the convert typically experiences the change as a rebirth. James’s account was built from hundreds of first-person testimonies, and it deliberately bracketed the question of which tradition the conversion served, treating the transformation itself as the phenomenon worth explaining.

Read through James, contemporary radicalization acquires a familiar shape. The recruit arrives at an extremist milieu carrying a divided self, a painful gap between who he is and who he feels he should be. The movement supplies a total interpretive framework, a new community, and a narrative in which the convert’s failures are explained, dignified, and redirected. The resulting change of identity can be as psychologically complete as any religious conversion, complete with a new name for oneself, new loyalties, and a cleaned-up moral account of one’s past. Walhout suggests that the widespread prevalence of this inner divided self among those who radicalize would become clear if case studies were examined closely, and he points to recent incidents described in public reporting as the kind of cases that invite this reading.

The comparison is not merely historical color. It changes what counts as an intervention. If radicalization is a conversion, then deradicalization is also a matter of transformation rather than simple persuasion. Here Walhout offers his most distinctive proposal: prevention itself should be understood as a different kind of conversion, one in which the individual converts not to a new ideology but to a new way of relating to his own perceived failures and humiliations. Rather than recruiting the wounded self into a crusade, a successful intervention helps the person metabolize failure without needing to annihilate it, joining a long pastoral tradition of counseling that treats shame and loss as materials for growth rather than ammunition for war.

This framing situates the paper within a growing body of work that treats spiritual and identity struggles, particularly among boys and men, as serious objects of study. Walhout’s own field has explored these themes before; Robert Dykstra’s essay on the spiritual quest of the loser and his recent reflection on whether life is still worth living both examine how failure and despair shape the inner lives of men. By connecting that pastoral literature to the empirical study of extremism, the paper builds a bridge that security-focused research has rarely attempted, and it echoes earlier theoretical concerns about liberty and self-development that stretch back to John Stuart Mill.

The approach also aligns with recent scholarship that pushes back against top-down models of radicalization. Hilary Pilkington’s edited volume on young people’s journeys through radicalizing milieus documents how individuals resist, negotiate, and reinterpret the extremist narratives around them, reinforcing the point that radicalization is never simply a matter of absorbing doctrine. Walhout’s contribution sharpens that insight by locating the decisive transformation inside the person: doctrine is less a cause than a vehicle for a project of self-remaking that was already underway.

The paper, received in August 2026 and published in October, does not claim to have solved the problem of extremism, and its evidence base is conceptual rather than experimental; the author notes that no datasets were generated or analyzed. Its value lies in the reframing it offers. If violent radicalization is, for many who undergo it, a conversion in William James’s sense, then the most important questions may not be about ideology at all, but about failure, humiliation, and the human need to turn a broken self into a whole one. And if prevention can become its own kind of conversion, one that offers the humiliated a different relationship to their pain, the pastoral tradition may have something practical to say to one of the most urgent policy problems of the age.

Subject of Research: Radicalization understood as self-transformation and conversion through a pastoral theological lens

Article Title: Radicalization as Conversion: A Pastoral Theological Perspective

Article References: Walhout, K. (2026). Radicalization as Conversion: A Pastoral Theological Perspective. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01383-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01383-y

Keywords: radicalization, conversion, William James, pastoral theology, masculinity, extremism, humiliation, self-transformation, deradicalization, Pastoral Psychology, identity, prevention

The framework builds on a long tradition in grief studies that distinguishes different layers of loss. First-order suffering refers to the direct, immediate pain of losing someone or something loved: the death of a family member, the end of a relationship, the loss of health or livelihood. This is the grief that most people picture when they hear the word, the raw ache that follows bereavement. Classic works in the field, such as Judith Viorst’s “Necessary Losses,” have emphasized that such losses are woven into the very fabric of human development, since growth itself requires surrendering attachments and illusions. Kenneth Doka’s work on disenfranchised grief has further shown that many of these losses go unmourned because society does not recognize them as legitimate grounds for sorrow.

Second-order suffering, in Arjona’s account, emerges from the ways individuals and communities respond to first-order losses. It includes the grief of witnessing others mourn, the secondary losses that cascade after an initial bereavement, and the suffering that arises when care systems fail. Howard Capps and other pastoral theologians have noted that grief is rarely a solitary affair: when one member of a family or congregation suffers, the loss ripples outward, altering relationships, roles, and identities. Second-order suffering also encompasses what Kaethe Weingarten has called “common shock,” the cumulative impact of witnessing violence and suffering in others, whether in person or through relentless media exposure. In this sense, the mourner grieves not only the original loss but the transformations that the loss imposes on everyone connected to it.

Third-order suffering is the most diffuse and, Arjona argues, the most neglected layer. It refers to the suffering generated by large-scale political and economic structures, what pastoral theologian Ryan LaMothe has described as the “political and economic apparatuses of carelessness” at work in the Anthropocene age. Borrowing from philosopher Giorgio Agamben, LaMothe defines an apparatus as anything with the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Neoliberalism, in this analysis, functions as a master apparatus: it organizes human beings into competitive, self-maximizing units, hollows out communal bonds, and renders care for others, for other species, and for the Earth itself economically invisible. Bruce Rogers-Vaughn’s influential work on caring for souls in a neoliberal age documents how this order produces chronic anxiety, rage, and a pervasive sense of abandonment, even among people who are materially comfortable.

Arjona’s central claim is that these three orders of suffering do not remain neatly separated in lived experience. They amalgamate. A person mourning a death may simultaneously carry the grief of a community in crisis, the dread of ecological collapse, and the grinding devaluation that neoliberal systems impose on anyone who cannot present themselves as productive and self-sufficient. The result is a composite weight, a rock in the soul, that conventional grief models struggle to address because they were designed for discrete, identifiable losses. When the layers are fused, the mourner may not even be able to say what exactly hurts, only that something heavy is present. This amalgamated quality, Arjona suggests, helps explain why so many people report a diffuse, unnameable sorrow that does not map onto any single event.

The article grounds this abstraction in concrete contemporary events. Arjona points to the shutdown of Spirit Airlines in May 2026, reported by The New York Times, as an example of how economic decisions generate layered suffering: workers lost livelihoods, travelers lost affordable connections, and communities lost institutions, all while public debate reduced the event to abstractions about antitrust politics. He cites reporting on a worsening water shortage in a Texas coastal city due to prolonged drought, an instance of ecological third-order suffering that falls hardest on those with the fewest resources. He also references the World Press Photo of the year, whose image of suffering circulates globally, inviting viewers into a kind of vicarious, second-order grief that is witnessed but rarely processed. These examples, he argues, show how personal, communal, and structural losses arrive together, fused into a single experiential weight.

The political dimension of the argument draws heavily on LaMothe’s account of the polis. LaMothe explains that, just as good-enough parents must hold the tension between identification and disidentification with their children, a healthy political community must hold a paradoxical tension between affirming likeness and including difference. When the polis veers toward the pole of identification, those who do not hold dominance are disidentified through physical exclusion, exploitation, marginalization, and oppression. LaMothe extends this “ontological rift” between self and other to the human-nonhuman relationship, and notes that the same logic underwrites racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism, in which human beings are constructed as absolutely Other and inferior. Arjona’s own earlier work on the criminalization of Mexicans in contemporary American politics exemplifies how such apparatuses of othering generate suffering that is simultaneously personal and structural.

Against this backdrop, Arjona insists that attention to third-order suffering is especially necessary in a neoliberal age, because the apparatus tends to privatize all suffering, recasting structural wounds as personal failures. If grief is understood only as an individual’s problem to be managed, the political forces that amalgamate it escape scrutiny. Dany-Robert Dufour’s analysis of rage in contemporary society, cited by Rogers-Vaughn, illustrates the danger: young people who cannot identify those responsible for their banishment turn their rage inward or against one another through violence. Amalgamated grief that is never named and never located in its structural causes, Arjona implies, risks curdling into exactly this kind of misdirected despair and anger.

Yet the article is not only diagnostic; it proposes ways to break up and ameliorate amalgamated grief. On the personal level, Arjona highlights the significance of vocation, the sense of being called to a purpose that exceeds economic utility. Recovering or deepening a personal vocation, he suggests, can reorient a sufferer away from the neoliberal measure of worth and toward forms of meaning that survive loss. He also emphasizes body-aware practices, echoing Carrie Doehring’s research on spiritual practices that reveal compassion in embodied, relational, and transcendent ways amid traumatic grief. Practices that attend to the body, whether contemplative, liturgical, or simply attentive breathing and movement, help mourners inhabit the weight rather than flee it, gradually loosening the amalgam so that its components can be felt, named, and mourned one by one.

Beyond these individual resources, Arjona argues that a genuinely political pastoral theology requires a commitment to communal practices that center the care of human beings, other species, and the Earth. Here he invokes LaMothe’s reading of Agamben’s concept of “inoperativity,” which entails the deactivation of apparatuses, not by destroying them but by refusing to let them define one’s identity or govern one’s gestures. In LaMothe’s account of the coming Jesus, inoperativity is a form of resistance: stepping outside the logic of productivity and dominance to practice what Arjona, following the keywords of the article, calls radical anarchic care. Such care is anarchic not because it is chaotic but because it refuses the archē, the ruling principle, of the carelessness apparatus. Communities that practice this care, tending to the grieving, the marginalized, the nonhuman, and the damaged Earth, create spaces where amalgamated grief can be disassembled and shared rather than carried alone. The article, published on 7 October 2026, ultimately offers both a vocabulary and a program: name the rock, understand how it was assembled, and then, together, begin to take it apart.

Subject of Research: A pastoral theological concept describing the convergence of first-, second-, and third-order suffering in grief within neoliberal society

Article Title: Amalgamated Grief: The Convergence of First-, Second-, and Third-Order Suffering Within the Human Soul

Article References: Arjona, R. (2026). Amalgamated Grief: The Convergence of First-, Second-, and Third-Order Suffering Within the Human Soul. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01379-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01379-8

Keywords: amalgamated grief, pastoral theology, third-order suffering, neoliberalism, grief studies, Ryan LaMothe, Bruce Rogers-Vaughn, Anthropocene, radical anarchic care, Pastoral Psychology, vocation, body-aware practices

The title’s central metaphor, the invisible mask, points to the way misconduct by religious leaders is concealed behind the public roles that clergy occupy. Protestant ministers operate within a dense web of expectations: they are trusted confidants, moral exemplars, community representatives, and, in many traditions, bearers of divine authority. That combination gives clergy unusual access to vulnerable people at moments of crisis, grief, and spiritual searching. It also gives them an unusually effective cover. When allegations surface, congregations often struggle to believe them precisely because the accused has performed the role of the trustworthy shepherd so convincingly. Researchers across sociology, psychology, and practical theology have documented this pattern for decades, and the mask metaphor captures how the professional persona can function simultaneously as a genuine identity and as a shield against accountability.

The scale of the problem has been estimated in several large studies of American religious life. Surveys conducted in the 1980s and 1990s, including work associated with researchers at the Center for Ethics and Social Policy and later analyses by academic sociologists, found that a substantial minority of congregants reported having experienced sexual contact or advances from a religious leader at some point in their lives, with the majority of reported cases involving clergy and adult women. Subsequent scholarship has emphasized that such relationships cannot be understood as consensual affairs in the ordinary sense, because the asymmetry of spiritual authority distorts the conditions under which consent can be freely given. This reframing, now widely accepted in professional ethics codes across denominations, treats clergy sexual misconduct as an abuse of power first and a sexual act second, a distinction that carries major implications for how congregations, denominations, and therapists respond.

What distinguishes the new volume, as its subtitle suggests, is its insistence that pastoral care responses to misconduct must be intercultural. Congregations in the United States and elsewhere are increasingly multiethnic and multiracial, and immigrant churches in particular occupy a distinctive position. In many Korean, Latino, African, and Asian congregations, the pastor functions not merely as a preacher but as an ethnic community leader, a social broker, and sometimes the most publicly visible member of the community. Scandal in such a setting does not stay within the congregation; it can threaten the standing of an entire immigrant community, intensifying pressures to silence victims, protect the leader, and preserve collective reputation. Scholars of immigrant religion have described how these dynamics can compound the harm done to survivors, who may face ostracism not only from their church but from the ethnic community that the church anchors.

Intercultural pastoral care, as a subdiscipline, draws on intercultural theology, postcolonial critique, and culturally grounded psychology to argue that caregiving practices developed in one cultural context cannot simply be transplanted into another. Applied to clergy misconduct, the approach raises hard questions. Standard denominational investigation procedures, modeled on corporate human-resources practice, may fail in communities where authority is understood patriarchally and where shame attaches to victims rather than perpetrators. Conversely, appeals to cultural difference must never become excuses for abuse. The challenge the field faces is to develop responses that are culturally attuned without being culturally relativist, holding offenders accountable while caring for survivors in ways that respect their cultural location and their particular burdens of stigma.

The appearance of the review in Pastoral Psychology is itself noteworthy. The journal, published by Springer Nature, has long served as a bridge between clinical psychology and practical theology, and its reviewers are typically scholars at theological seminaries rather than secular research universities. Hee Jin Lee, who reviewed the book, is based at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Kentucky, an institution embedded in the mainline Protestant world whose denominations have wrestled publicly with misconduct cases and with the policies that govern them. A review in this venue indicates that the book is being read not as an exposé but as a contribution to professional formation, the kind of text that may shape how future ministers, chaplains, and pastoral counselors are trained to recognize and respond to abuse of authority.

The broader institutional context has shifted dramatically over the past two decades. The Roman Catholic abuse crises, the #MeToo movement, and investigative journalism into Southern Baptist Convention handling of abuse allegations have collectively dismantled the assumption that Protestant congregations are structurally safer than other religious bodies. Denominations have responded with mandatory reporting training, background checks, clergy ethics codes, and independent review boards. Yet researchers and survivor advocates continue to document gaps between policy and practice, particularly in independent and nondenominational churches that lack external oversight, and in immigrant congregations where denominational connections are weak or nominal. Scholarship that examines how culture, authority, and silence interact is therefore in high demand among denominational officials, seminary educators, and clinicians who work with survivors.

For clinicians, the practical stakes are considerable. Survivors of clergy misconduct frequently present with symptoms that resemble complex trauma: shattered trust, spiritual injury, depression, and difficulty forming new attachments, including to religious communities themselves. Effective treatment often requires therapists who understand the specific theological vocabulary of the survivor’s tradition, since recovery may involve renegotiating a relationship with God that the abuser claimed to represent. This is where the pastoral care literature and the clinical literature converge, and where an intercultural framework earns its keep. A Korean American survivor, a rural Midwestern congregant, and a member of an African diaspora church may carry different layers of communal expectation, and a caregiving response that ignores those layers risks re-traumatizing the very person it aims to help.

The publication of a 331-page monograph devoted to the intersection of clergy misconduct and intercultural care also reflects a maturing of the research field itself. Early studies of clergy misconduct were largely descriptive and often denominational in scope. More recent work has become theoretically ambitious, drawing on feminist theology, liberation theology, and critical studies of race and religion, all of which appear among the subject classifications that Springer associates with this title. The book’s placement within Palgrave Macmillan’s religious studies list, and its pricing at $109.99 for the hardcover edition, mark it as a library and scholarly acquisition rather than a mass-market title, the typical route by which such specialized research reaches seminary classrooms and eventually filters into denominational policy debates.

Readers seeking the full assessment can consult the review itself, published as Lee, H., ‘Protestant Clergy Sexual Misconduct and Intercultural Pastoral Care: Invisible Mask. By AHyun Lee. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. xv + 331 pp. $109.99 hardcover,’ in Pastoral Psychology (2026), available through Springer at doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01380-1, with the underlying book accessible at doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-89199-1. As congregations continue to grapple with the fallout of misconduct cases and as their memberships grow more culturally complex, scholarly work that names the invisible mask, and asks what it takes to remove it, is likely to remain both contested and essential.

Subject of Research: Clergy sexual misconduct and intercultural approaches to pastoral care in Protestant congregations

Article Title: Protestant Clergy Sexual Misconduct and Intercultural Pastoral Care: Invisible Mask. By AHyun Lee. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. xv + 331 pp. $109.99 hardcover

Article References: Lee, H. J. (2026). Protestant Clergy Sexual Misconduct and Intercultural Pastoral Care: Invisible Mask. By AHyun Lee. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025. xv + 331 pp. $109.99 hardcover. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01380-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01380-1

Keywords: clergy sexual misconduct, pastoral care, Protestantism, intercultural theology, pastoral psychology, abuse of power, immigrant churches, survivor care, seminary education, feminist theology, religious authority, Palgrave Macmillan

May, who died in 2005 and spent much of his career at the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, drew a famous distinction in his 1982 book Will and Spirit between two postures of the human will. Willfulness, in his account, is the ego’s insistence on consenting to reality only on its own terms, a posture of control that resists surrender. Willingness is its opposite: an unforced, open consent to what is, including the presence of God, other people, and one’s own inner life. May, who also wrote influentially about addiction and grace, saw willfulness not as simple defiance but as a deep structure of attachment and avoidance. Lee’s central move is to argue that digital environments do not merely distract young people; they actively train willfulness, making the ego’s demand for control feel effortless and natural.

The article coins the term “digital willfulness” to name this pattern. Drawing on what Lee calls pastoral thick description, an approach indebted to anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s method of interpreting cultures from within, the paper describes three reinforcing mechanisms. First, digital environments encourage affect regulation through immediate mediation: uncomfortable feelings are met not by sitting with them but by opening an app, scrolling, gaming, or messaging until the emotion is buffered. Second, platforms reward self-curation on strictly egoic terms, since profiles, feeds, and algorithmic mirrors invite users to present and even perceive themselves only as they wish to be seen. Third, and most theologically significant, digital life trains avoidance of unmediated presence before God, self, and others, because every moment of silence, boredom, or face-to-face exposure can be escaped with a screen.

The technical vocabulary Lee deploys here comes from several converging literatures. Emotion-regulation research, notably the work summarized by psychologist James Gross, distinguishes strategies that modify an emotional situation from strategies that avoid it altogether, and experiential avoidance has long been implicated in behavioral disorders by acceptance and commitment therapy researchers such as Steven Hayes and colleagues. The digital world, Lee suggests, industrializes avoidance. The paper also situates itself amid the heated empirical debate over social media and youth mental health, citing systematic reviews linking heavy use to depression, anxiety, and disturbed sleep, cohort studies connecting online experience to loneliness among young adults, and high-profile interventions from the American Psychological Association and the U.S. Surgeon General. Lee is careful, however, not to reduce the problem to screen-time arithmetic; the point is formational, not merely quantitative.

That formational framing draws on a lineage of pastoral theology that treats digital technology as an environment shaping desire, not just a tool. Scholars such as Kylie Agnew-Bingaman have argued that neuroplasticity itself makes contemplative practice pastorally relevant, since repeated practices physically reshape attentional circuits, while James K. A. Smith’s account of habit and liturgy argues that humans are formed by what they repeatedly love. Sherry Turkle’s studies of conversation and solitude, Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis of the attention economy, and Tristan Harris’s critiques of platform design all appear in the paper’s evidentiary spine. What these sources share, in Lee’s reading, is the insight that digital systems are not neutral containers of content; they are training regimes for the will.

Against this diagnosis, Lee proposes willingness as the central aim of spiritual formation in the digital age, and he argues that two classical practices together form what he calls a pastoral ecology of counter-formation. The first is Centering Prayer, the silent, wordless prayer form renewed by Trappist monks Thomas Keating, M. Basil Pennington, and William Meninger from sources such as The Cloud of Unknowing. In Centering Prayer, a practitioner settles into silence, consents to God’s presence, and when thoughts arise, gently returns to a sacred word. Lee reads the practice technically: it retrains attention, decouples affective reactivity from immediate soothing, and rehearses embodied consent, the very capacity that digital willfulness erodes. Empirical work gives the proposal some grounding, including a pilot study by Andres Eros and Thomas Plante on Centering Prayer and well-being in undergraduates, an intervention study by Johannes Rohde and colleagues on contemplative practice and flourishing, and earlier process research by Jason Ferguson and colleagues on prayer and everyday stress.

The second practice is spiritual direction, the ancient accompaniment described by May himself in Care of Mind, Care of Spirit and by William Barry and William Connolly. Where Centering Prayer works on attention from the inside, Lee argues, spiritual direction provides relational containment and theological discernment from the outside: a regular, unhurried, human relationship in which a digitally saturated young adult can narrate experience, notice patterns of avoidance, and interpret them theologically rather than morally. The pairing matters because neither practice alone suffices; silent prayer without discernment can become private technique, and conversation without contemplative depth can dissolve into advice. Together, Lee contends, they counter-form the will that platforms have colonized.

A fictionalized composite vignette, a recognized method in pastoral theology as practiced by researchers such as Mary Clark Moschella, illustrates the movement from digital willfulness toward willingness in a plausible pastoral case. Lee also extends the argument into territory where technology and theology collide most dramatically: the discourse of “techno sapiens” and the suggestion, surfacing in works by Yuval Noah Harari, Max Tegmark, and others, that artificial intelligence might function as a kind of deity. Recent contributions from the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the theologian Noreen Herzfeld, Marius Dorobantu, and Benjamin Singler have explored whether AI can bear or mediate the divine. Lee responds by defining re-formation as the graced redirection of an ongoing formation process, and by interpreting willingness as an enacted expression of a relational imago Dei, the image of God understood not as a capacity that machines might replicate but as a mode of relation that only creatures capable of consent can live.

The paper’s constructive method means it advances proposals rather than testable hypotheses, and readers expecting new survey data will not find them; the author notes that no datasets were generated or analyzed. Yet the essay lands at a moment when both church and clinic are searching for language beyond the addiction frame. By relocating the problem from behavior to the will, Lee offers pastoral caregivers a non-shaming diagnosis: digital natives are not simply broken or addicted, but trained into a posture of control that contemplative practice can patiently unlearn. Whether the prescription of silence, consent, and unhurried spiritual friendship can compete with an economy engineered to capture attention remains the open question, and it is precisely the one this paper is designed to provoke.

Subject of Research: Gerald May's contemplative psychology applied to pastoral and spiritual care of digital natives

Article Title: From Digital Willfulness to Willingness: Gerald May’s Contemplative Psychology for Pastoral and Spiritual Care of Digital Natives

Article References: Lee, J. H. (2026). From Digital Willfulness to Willingness: Gerald May’s Contemplative Psychology for Pastoral and Spiritual Care of Digital Natives. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01378-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01378-9

Keywords: pastoral psychology, digital natives, Gerald May, willfulness, willingness, Centering Prayer, spiritual direction, spiritual formation, digital willfulness, contemplative practice, imago Dei, attention economy

The scale of the problem is difficult to overstate. Surveys suggest that approximately 27 to 33 percent of U.S. adults report religious trauma, a figure that implies tens of millions of people carrying psychological, spiritual, relational, and somatic injuries linked to their religious lives. Yet current diagnostic frameworks, the paper argues, do not fully capture these consequences. Survivors may present with symptoms that resemble post-traumatic stress, complicated grief, or moral injury, but the harm is threaded through their relationship with the divine, their sense of identity, and the communities that once structured their entire social world. Clinicians are actively treating this population without validated guidance, improvising from adjacent trauma literatures.

Summers grounds the framework in attachment theory, the account of human development first articulated by John Bowlby, in which infants build internal working models of relationships from the responsiveness of their caregivers. Research on the psychology of religion has extended this logic upward: many believers treat God as an attachment figure, a source of proximity, comfort, and safe haven whose perceived responsiveness shapes emotional regulation much as a parent’s does. Experimental work has supported this picture, showing that activating thoughts of God can buffer distress in ways that track a person’s internal working models. If God functions as an attachment figure, then abuse mediated by religious authority can wound the very attachment system that once provided the survivor’s deepest sense of safety.

This is why the framework treats attachment to God and the God image as primary clinical targets, distinct from general psychological symptomatology. A survivor may reduce their anxiety scores while still carrying a terrifying or humiliating internal representation of the divine, one that reactivates under stress, prayer, or even the sight of a church steeple. The framework also attends to the developmental pathways through which each survivor’s religious life was formed. Someone raised from childhood inside a high-control community has a different architecture of harm than an adult recruited into an abusive group, and the clinical entry points differ accordingly. Religious life, in this view, is not a belief system bolted onto a personality but a developmental structure interwoven with emotion regulation, identity, and relationships.

The five clinical targets around which the framework is organized come from the psychotherapy literature on trauma more broadly: they encompass the survivor’s capacity for emotional regulation, their attachment relationships, their sense of self, their narrative and meaning-making, and the somatic residues of threat that lodge in the body. Religious and spiritual abuse touches each of these. Shame, a recurrent theme in the empirical literature on religious trauma, functions as a self-directed emotion that corrodes identity rather than merely signaling bad behavior. Studies of former members of high-demand religious groups point to identity, meaning, and social support as the key mediators between spiritual abuse and psychological outcomes, which is precisely the territory these targets are designed to cover.

Against those targets, the framework positions four therapy modalities, selected on theoretical grounds rather than on outcome data, which for this population does not yet exist. Emotionally focused individual therapy, developed from Susan Johnson’s attachment-based model, works directly on emotional processing and the restructuring of attachment bonds, making it a natural fit for a survivor whose attachment to God has become a source of terror rather than comfort. The approach has a substantial process research base in couples work and a manualized individual variant, and its core claim, that adaptive adult functioning depends on accessible and responsive attachment figures, translates coherently to survivors reworking their image of the divine.

Internal family systems therapy offers a different technical angle. Richard Schwartz’s model conceptualizes the mind as a system of subpersonalities, or parts, including exiles carrying trauma burdens and protectors that manage them, led by a core Self with capacities for calm and compassion. A pilot effectiveness study of internal family systems for PTSD among survivors of multiple childhood traumas reported reductions in symptoms, and the model’s pluralistic view of the self maps well onto survivors who hold warring internal positions, the devout believer and the furious critic, the obedient child and the escaping adult. Narrative therapy, meanwhile, addresses the meaning-making target directly: abusive religious systems often supply totalizing stories that define the survivor’s worth, and narrative practice helps people externalize those stories and author alternatives, a technique with growing support in trauma-related disorders.

The fourth modality, somatic experiencing, developed by Peter Levine and grounded in part in Stephen Porges’s polyvagal account of the autonomic nervous system, targets the body. Religious abuse frequently deploys fear of eternal punishment, social exclusion, and divine wrath, threats that condition deep physiological defensive responses. Somatic experiencing works by titrating discharge of survival energy and restoring regulation of the autonomic nervous system, and it is one of the few modalities in the framework supported by a randomized controlled outcome study for PTSD, published in 2017. For survivors whose religious fear lives in their bodies as much as in their beliefs, this somatic route addresses a dimension that talk-centered therapies can miss.

The paper is careful about the limits of what it can claim. The four modalities are presented as promising, not proven, for this specific population, and the theoretical fit of each to the harm dimensions of religious abuse is an argument, not a demonstration. Measurement itself remains immature: spiritual abuse questionnaires and scales such as the Spiritual Harm and Abuse Scale have only recently been developed, and definitional debates continue across the literatures on spiritual abuse, religious trauma, and adverse religious experiences. A systematic review of empirical work on religious and spiritual abuse and trauma confirmed a growing but still thin evidence base, concentrated in descriptive studies rather than treatment research.

That gap is the paper’s closing argument. With roughly a third of American adults reporting religious trauma and no intervention outcome studies of any design available, the field’s most urgent priority, Summers writes, is rigorous testing of treatments for survivors of adverse religious and spiritual experiences. Until those trials exist, clinicians must work from theory, and the value of this framework lies in making that improvisation systematic: matching specific dimensions of harm to specific therapeutic mechanisms, honoring the attachment relationship with God as a clinical target in its own right, and giving researchers a structured map of where the evidence must go next. For a population that has often been told its pain is not real, the recognition that it demands serious science is itself a clinical intervention.

Subject of Research: Attachment-informed clinical framework for treating religious and spiritual abuse as trauma

Article Title: Religious and Spiritual Abuse: Trauma, Attachment, and an Integrative Framework for Clinical Response

Article References: Summers, H. (2026). Religious and Spiritual Abuse: Trauma, Attachment, and an Integrative Framework for Clinical Response. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01375-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01375-y

Keywords: religious trauma, spiritual abuse, attachment theory, attachment to God, trauma-informed care, emotionally focused therapy, internal family systems, narrative therapy, somatic experiencing, clinical framework, Pastoral Psychology, psychotherapy

The framework, called the sacred speech–psychological internalisation model (SSPIM), was developed by Bandara Bandaranayake, an independent researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. Presented as a heuristic rather than a tested theory, the model draws together insights from speech act theory, the sociology and psychology of religion, attachment theory, and research on psychological internalisation. Its central claim is that under particular developmental, relational, and cultural conditions, sacred language acquires existential significance, becomes emotionally encoded in memory, is reinforced by religious communities, and is gradually internalised as lasting patterns of conscience, compassion, shame, and moral identity. In other words, the words of spiritual authority do not merely instruct; they can become part of the psychological architecture of the self.

The intellectual scaffolding of the model begins with speech act theory, the philosophical tradition inaugurated by J. L. Austin and elaborated by John Searle, which established that language does not simply describe reality but performs actions within it. A judge’s sentence, a officiant’s declaration of marriage, or a priest’s absolution changes social reality through the act of speaking, provided the speaker holds recognised authority and the hearer accepts the institutional context. Sacred speech, the model argues, represents an especially potent class of performative language because its presumed authority derives not merely from institutional office but from the claimed mediation of ultimate reality. When a religious leader declares something sacred, forbidden, forgiven, or defiled, the utterance carries a weight that ordinary commands cannot replicate, because it appears to connect the listener’s finite life to transcendent order.

Sociological and psychological perspectives on religion supply the second pillar. From Émile Durkheim’s analysis of religion as a collective phenomenon that generates shared emotional energy, to Max Weber’s account of charismatic religious authority, to more recent anthropological work such as Tanya Luhrmann’s studies of how evangelical Christians learn to experience God as communicative, researchers have documented how communities and institutions amplify the force of sacred words. The SSPIM incorporates these insights by emphasising that sacred speech is rarely encountered in isolation. It arrives embedded in ritual, repetition, music, communal assent, and the visible reverence of others, all of which deepen its emotional encoding. Research on emotionally charged memory, including Joseph LeDoux’s work on the amygdala and Elizabeth Phelps’s studies of amygdala-hippocampus interactions, suggests why such linguistically delivered experiences may be stored with unusual durability: words that arrive wrapped in awe, fear, joy, or communal fervour are prioritised by the memory systems that tag experiences as significant.

Attachment theory provides the model’s third foundation. Studies by Pehr Granqvist and Lee Kirkpatrick have shown that religious belief and conversion often follow patterns analogous to attachment relationships, with God or sacred figures functioning as attachment figures who offer security, comfort, and a felt presence. The SSPIM extends this logic to sacred speech itself: words spoken by a spiritually authoritative figure can be experienced the way a child experiences a caregiver’s voice, carrying signals of safety or threat that are absorbed pre-reflectively. This relational encoding helps explain, the model suggests, why a phrase of divine forgiveness spoken by a trusted pastor can dissolve guilt in moments, while a phrase of divine condemnation delivered by the same authority can install a chronic sense of unworthiness that persists long after the person has left the community.

The model’s most distinctive contribution is its account of internalisation, the process by which external voices become internal ones. Drawing on classical and contemporary theories of how children absorb parental prohibitions and values into conscience, the SSPIM proposes a staged pathway. Sacred language first acquires existential significance when the listener perceives it as bearing on ultimate matters such as salvation, moral standing, or life’s meaning. It is then emotionally encoded, tagged with the affect present at the moment of reception. Religious communities subsequently reinforce the encoded message through liturgy, teaching, and social confirmation. Over time, the external voice falls silent, and its content persists as an inner moral presence: a conscience that condemns or absolves, a compassionate orientation toward others, a shame response to perceived transgression, or a stable sense of moral identity. Crucially, this process is not confined to childhood. Adults in periods of crisis, conversion, or heightened receptivity appear capable of the same deep internalisation of sacred speech.

Bandaranayake frames the divergent outcomes of this process using the concepts of spiritual placebo and spiritual nocebo effects. On the adaptive pathway, internalised sacred speech functions as a spiritual placebo: it fosters resilience, meaning-making, compassion, and moral confidence. The literature on religion, spirituality, and health, including Harold Koenig’s reviews and Crystal Park’s work on meaning-making after stressful events, documents associations between benevolent religious framing and improved psychological adjustment. Words of unconditional love, forgiveness, and worthiness, once internalised, can operate as enduring psychological resources, comparable in function to a secure internal working model of a loving caregiver. Research on divine forgiveness by Frank Fincham and colleagues, and on spiritually integrated psychotherapy by Kenneth Pargament, illustrates how such internalised benevolent speech can be therapeutically mobilised.

On the maladaptive pathway, the same mechanism becomes a spiritual nocebo. Sacred speech that emphasises condemnation, impurity, or perpetual danger can be internalised as chronic shame, anxiety, scrupulosity, and diminished personal agency. The psychology of shame and guilt, notably June Tangney and Rhonda Dearing’s distinction between shame as a global condemnation of the self and guilt as a focused assessment of behaviour, helps clarify why religiously framed messages that target the whole person, rather than specific acts, are particularly corrosive. Clinical literature on religious and spiritual struggles, including work by Julie Exline and Pargament, links such struggles to depression, anxiety, and diminished wellbeing, while scholarship on spiritual abuse by Lisa Oakley and Kathryn Kinmond and on trauma-attentive spiritual repair by L. Kalvari documents the harm that can follow when authority is exercised coercively. The model thus treats the same psychological process as capable of producing either flourishing or pathology, depending on the content, context, and relational quality of the sacred speech involved.

To ground the framework, the article draws illustrative examples from Christianity and Buddhism, while insisting that its focus is psychological rather than doctrinal. Christian practices of absolution, blessing, and preaching demonstrate how authoritative sacred speech can be internalised as forgiveness or as crippling guilt, and devotional traditions in which believers cultivate a conversational relationship with God show the endpoint of internalisation: the external authoritative voice becomes an experienced inner interlocutor. Buddhist traditions offer a complementary case, in which the spoken teachings of the Buddha and of living teachers, along with recited texts and formal refuges, function as authoritative speech that practitioners internalise as ethical orientation and meditative attitude, with compassion and mindfulness as the intended fruits. The article emphasises that the mechanisms under study concern human psychology, not the truth claims of any tradition.

The SSPIM is offered explicitly as a springboard for empirical research rather than a finished scientific account. The author proposes that future studies could test the model’s stages experimentally and longitudinally, examining how perceived spiritual authority, emotional context, community reinforcement, and attachment history predict the depth and valence of internalisation, and how internalised sacred speech relates to measures of conscience, shame, scrupulosity, resilience, and moral identity. Practical implications are outlined for pastoral care, spiritually integrated psychotherapy, and religious leadership: caregivers and clinicians may benefit from attending to the specific sacred sentences clients carry within them, since reframing or repairing those internalised utterances may be as therapeutically important as addressing early caregiver relationships. Religious leaders, for their part, are reminded that their words are never merely informational; spoken under recognised authority and received within communities of trust, they are quite literally formative, capable of building consciences and compassion or of installing burdens that last a lifetime. As research on the psychology of religion continues to mature, the framework suggests that one of its most important objects of study may be the simplest of all: the sentence spoken in earnest, from a place of sacred authority, into an open human heart.

Subject of Research: The psychological internalisation of sacred speech and the adaptive and maladaptive effects of spiritual authority

Article Title: Sacred Speech and Psychological Internalisation: Understanding the Psychological Power of Spiritual Authority

Article References: Bandaranayake, B. (2026). Sacred Speech and Psychological Internalisation: Understanding the Psychological Power of Spiritual Authority. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01370-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01370-3

Keywords: sacred language, spiritual authority, psychology of religion, internalisation, speech act theory, attachment theory, moral identity, shame, scrupulosity, pastoral psychology, spiritually integrated psychotherapy, meaning-making

William James’s concept of the sick soul, first articulated in his 1902 Gifford Lectures published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, remains one of the most durable frameworks in the psychology of religion for understanding a particular kind of anguish. Unlike melancholy that merely dims experience, the sick soul describes a condition in which the world itself loses its grip on a person, in which goods that once seemed self-evidently worthwhile appear hollow, and in which the very act of existing can feel like a wrong to be righted. James catalogued such experiences across centuries of religious autobiography, arguing that they represent not simply pathology but a distinctive way of encountering reality, one that sees through the cheerful surface of things to a deeper unease. For James, this vision, however painful, carried epistemic weight: the sick soul perceives something real about the fragility of meaning that healthier temperaments may systematically miss.

The counterpoint to the sick soul in James’s typology is the twice-born character, the person who passes through rupture and emerges into a restored relationship with the world. Crucially, James insisted that this restoration is not achieved by an act of will alone. The healthy-minded person, who never falls into crisis, simply affirms the world’s goodness; the twice-born person, by contrast, must receive a new relation to the world from beyond the boundaries of the self. James described this as a process in which the divided self surrenders, and in surrendering finds that the world, or God, meets it with new significance. It is this receptive structure of transformation that Clements and Teeter place at the center of their account of masculine crisis, arguing that the remedy for a broken relation to the world cannot be manufactured by further assertion of the self that is already in distress.

The claim that boys and men tend to relate to the world through projection rather than reception has a substantial research lineage behind it. Work on conformity to masculine norms has repeatedly linked restrictive masculine socialization to poorer mental health outcomes, including a 2017 meta-analysis in the Journal of Counseling Psychology that found associations between conformity to traditional masculine norms and negative psychological indicators. Addis and Mahalik’s influential 2003 analysis in American Psychologist framed men’s reluctance to seek help as a product of social contexts that reward self-reliance and penalize disclosure. The American Psychological Association’s 2018 guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men, the first of their kind, codified these concerns into professional standards, citing evidence that men die by suicide at elevated rates, underuse mental health services, and often externalize distress through anger, substance use, or withdrawal rather than voicing it directly.

Against this backdrop, the receptive self that the authors describe offers a reframing of what therapeutic and pastoral work with men might aim at. If a man’s crisis stems from a self that has been projected outward and found wanting, then interventions that simply urge him to project harder, to assert confidence, to fix himself through effort, may deepen the original rupture. The authors’ argument suggests instead that what is needed is a posture in which the man becomes available to being addressed, by other people, by the natural world, by religious reality, or by his own unarticulated inner life. This is why listening, rather than speaking or asserting, becomes the central metaphor of the paper. A listener does not impose meaning; a listener makes room for meaning to arrive from elsewhere.

The methodological instrument supporting this claim is the listening guide, a qualitative research technique developed by Carol Gilligan and her collaborators over several decades. The method asks researchers to attend to a participant’s narrative in multiple sequential passes, each time listening for a different register: the plot of the story, the voice of the first-person I, and the relationships in which that voice is embedded. Gilligan and Jessica Eddy, writing in Qualitative Psychology in 2021, described the method as both new and timeless, and characterized it as opening oneself, one’s inner world, to the voices and experiences of others. A 2025 study in Psychology of Men and Masculinities by Shames-Dawson, Ozoguz, and Rubin argued explicitly for the utility of the listening guide in the psychology of men and masculinities, a field that has historically struggled to get men talking about interior experience at all.

The listening guide’s emphasis on drawing out the I voice of participants connects to a broader body of research on boys’ relational capacities. Niobe Way’s longitudinal work with adolescent boys, reported in her 2011 book Deep Secrets, documented that boys in early and mid-adolescence often speak with striking emotional openness about their closest friendships, and that this openness appears to erode as they absorb cultural mandates about masculine stoicism. Way’s findings suggest that the capacity for receptive, intimate listening is not absent in boys but suppressed, which lends empirical plausibility to the claim that receptivity is more basic to masculine being than projection. If boys begin with a rich relational receptivity that is trained out of them, then recovery of that receptivity in adulthood is a matter of unlearning rather than acquisition.

The paper’s philosophical architecture also draws on a tradition of thought about how selves and worlds relate. James himself held that the relationship between self and world is pluralistic but not relativistic. Many persons receive many different significances from the world, and each person may feel that the divine meets him on the basis of his personal concerns, yet this plurality does not collapse into the claim that all interpretations are equally true. A shared public world exists, one whose meanings can be agreed upon, disputed, and clarified through public interrogation. Science contributes a set of facts to this interrogation, James argued, but it does not supply the personal point of view from which facts become significant. Two people may perceive the same animal, one as food and the other as a conscious being, and the reception of either significance does not render the alternative false.

This pluralistic realism has practical consequences for pastoral care. It means that a caregiver need not choose between respecting a man’s idiosyncratic way of finding meaning and affirming that some meanings are more adequate than others. The world genuinely affords different roles and purposes to different people, but the affording is not arbitrary, and it can fail. When the world stops affording, when a man can no longer receive purpose from his work, his relationships, or his faith, the resulting condition resembles what James called the sick soul. The authors’ contention is that this failure of reception, rather than any deficit of assertive energy, is often the underlying structure of masculine spiritual distress.

The broader cultural diagnosis embedded in the paper resonates with sociological accounts of contemporary masculinity. Michael Kimmel’s Guyland mapped the prolonged adolescence of young men suspended between dependence and adulthood, while writers such as William Pollack described the boy code that teaches emotional silence from an early age. Hartmut Rosa’s theory of social acceleration adds another layer, suggesting that the pace of modern life itself undermines the slow, receptive attention that listening requires. Simone Weil, whom the authors cite, wrote that attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer, a formulation that captures the paper’s implicit claim that listening is not a passive state but a demanding spiritual discipline. On this view, the inability of many men to receive a self from the world is not a personal failing alone but a symptom of environments that reward projection, speed, and performance.

The concept of self-compassion, which appears in the paper’s reference list through the work of Kristin Neff and colleagues, offers an empirical bridge between the philosophical argument and clinical practice. Meta-analytic evidence, including a 2019 review of randomized controlled trials in Mindfulness, supports self-compassion interventions for improving psychosocial outcomes, and research by Breines and Chen has shown that self-compassion can increase rather than decrease motivation for self-improvement, countering the worry that gentleness toward oneself breeds complacency. For men whose sick-soul condition involves harsh self-judgment, the cultivation of a receptive stance toward one’s own suffering may be a precondition for any outward transformation. One cannot listen to the world while at war with oneself.

The paper’s placement within pastoral psychology is significant for how its argument is meant to land. Pastoral caregivers occupy a position distinct from clinicians, in that they are explicitly concerned with questions of meaning, purpose, and ultimate reality, not only symptom reduction. A pastoral framework allows the authors to treat the twice-born transformation as a genuinely religious category while keeping it in conversation with psychological science. The preparation of the article for the 2026 Philadelphia Group for Pastoral Theology with Boys and Men indicates that its intended audience consists of practitioners who work directly with men in religious contexts, where the language of surrender, vocation, and being called retains natural currency.

What the study ultimately contributes is a reframing of the question that men in crisis ask themselves. The dominant cultural script tells a struggling man that he must pull himself together, define a goal, and impose it on his circumstances, an instruction that assumes the self is something he already possesses and merely needs to deploy. The Jamesian account advanced by Clements and Teeter inverts this assumption. The self in crisis is precisely the self that cannot be deployed, and the way forward runs through a discipline of listening in which roles, purpose, and self-understanding are received from a world that has not, in fact, gone silent. Transformation, on this view, begins not with a declaration but with an ear.

Subject of Research: The role of receptive listening in masculine psychological and spiritual transformation, drawing on William James's concept of the sick soul.

Article Title: Listening for Transformation: Masculinity, the Sick Soul, and the Receptive Self

Article References: Clements, C., & Teeter, J. (2026). Listening for Transformation: Masculinity, the Sick Soul, and the Receptive Self. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01368-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01368-x

Keywords: masculinity, William James, sick soul, receptivity, listening guide, pastoral psychology, patriarchy, mental health, transformation, modernity, Christian tradition, MeToo

The historical backdrop matters here. Before Freud published The Future of an Illusion in 1927, the care of souls, a phrase Socrates used in Greek and from which the word psychotherapy ultimately derives, was an integrated enterprise in which religious traditions, philosophy, and early psychology worked in concert. Freud’s atheism and his dismissal of religion as wishful thinking helped drive a wedge between pastoral care and clinical treatment that persisted throughout the twentieth century. Only in recent decades has the pendulum swung back. A growing body of evidence, including a comprehensive 2018 meta-analysis and national surveys showing that most mental health clients consider religion and spirituality relevant to their wellbeing, has pushed SIP into the mainstream of mental health and healthcare practice.

Yet despite this clinical momentum, researchers knew surprisingly little about how practitioners themselves conceptualize the approach. Most existing studies measure outcomes or client preferences; few have examined the mental models of the therapists doing the integrating. Schmidt and her colleagues addressed this gap with a practice-based qualitative design, recruiting eleven participants enrolled in supervised psychospiritual education programs at theological colleges affiliated with the Toronto School of Theology. These programs train master’s-level students whose curricula align with the competencies required by provincial psychotherapy regulators, meaning graduates qualify for registration as psychotherapists. The participants were learning to engage in SIP while completing clinical placements in hospitals serving as practicum sites.

The methodological apparatus was rigorous for a qualitative study. Participants completed weekly clinical reflections throughout their placements, producing forty-four anonymous reflection forms, and then sat for post-study semi-structured interviews. The researchers analyzed the data using constant comparative methods, an iterative approach in which emerging codes are continuously compared against new data until stable themes crystallize. They also employed both data triangulation, drawing on multiple sources of evidence, and investigator triangulation, with all three authors coding and analyzing the material manually rather than relying on qualitative data management software. This combination is designed to guard against the single-analyst bias that can distort interpretive research.

Three primary themes emerged from the analysis, and together they paint a striking picture. First, participants described spirituality and psychotherapy as inseparable and interwoven throughout clinical practice, not as two tools pulled from different boxes depending on the client. For these novice therapists, the sacred was not an add-on module activated only when a client raised religious concerns; it was woven into the fabric of every session. This finding suggests that, at least for practitioners trained in integrated programs, SIP is less a technique and more a fundamental orientation toward the therapeutic encounter.

Second, participants understood SIP as rooted in a wholistic view of personhood, which made it applicable to all clinical encounters, including those with nonreligious clients. This is a subtle but consequential point. If spirituality is understood broadly, as the dimension of human experience concerned with meaning, purpose, and connection to the sacred or transcendent, then every client has a spiritual life worth attending to, whether or not they belong to a faith tradition. The participants’ framing echoes the work of Kenneth Pargament, whose foundational 2007 text defined spiritually integrated psychotherapy as understanding and addressing the sacred in its many forms, and it aligns with large-scale research on spirituality and meaning-making showing that spiritual processes operate across religious and secular contexts alike.

Third, participants described an alignment, a good fit, between their personal and spiritual identities and person-centered therapy, and they treated this congruence as the foundation of their clinical work. Person-centered therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, emphasizes empathy, unconditional positive regard, and the therapist’s authentic presence rather than directive technique. For these trainees, the relational stance of person-centered practice resonated with their own spiritual commitments, making SIP feel less like a foreign import and more like a natural extension of who they already were. The study suggests this identity-practice alignment is what grounds their clinical encounters and sustains their confidence in bringing spiritual dimensions into the room.

Taken together, the three themes point to what the authors call a unified ontological conceptualization of SIP, grounded in a relational understanding of both person and practice. Ontology, in this context, refers to beliefs about the fundamental nature of reality and of the human being. The participants were not treating spirituality and psychology as two parallel languages requiring translation; they operated from an underlying vision of the person as an integrated whole, in which the psychological and the sacred are aspects of a single reality encountered through relationship. The researchers note a conceptual resonance with the Indigenous framework of two-eyed seeing, or Etuaptmumk, articulated by Mi’kmaq elder Albert Marshall, in which one eye is trained on the strengths of Indigenous knowledge and the other on Western knowledge, with the two perspectives deliberately woven together rather than held apart.

The implications for training are significant. The authors argue that supervised education in SIP should include ontological integration, helping trainees develop a unified worldview, rather than treating spirituality and psychology as separate domains that students must learn to toggle between. This matters because the field is expanding rapidly: theological colleges in Canada are training growing cohorts of psychotherapists and spiritual care practitioners whose clinical specialty is spiritual integration, and organizations such as the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education have developed formal SIP training programs with defined clinical competencies. If novice practitioners naturally conceptualize the work as unified, training models that fragment the material may work against the very integration they aim to teach.

The study also contributes to a broader methodological movement. Practice-based evidence, the paradigm of deriving knowledge directly from routine clinical settings rather than controlled laboratory conditions, has been championed by researchers seeking to bridge the gap between research and real-world practice. By examining how practitioners think rather than merely what outcomes they achieve, this study adds a cognitive and formational dimension to that evidence base. The authors note that a separate paper drawn from the same dataset will address how competency in SIP is actually learned in clinical practice, promising further insight into the formation of the next generation of spiritually integrated therapists. As healthcare systems increasingly recognize spirituality as a dimension of serious illness and health, understanding how clinicians internalize this integration may prove as important as the integration itself.

Subject of Research: How novice psychospiritual therapists and spiritual care interns conceptualize spiritually integrated psychotherapy in clinical practice

Article Title: Weaving the Sacred and the Psychological: A Practice-Based Study of How Practitioners Conceptualize Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy

Article References: Schmidt, A., Potgieter, M., & O’Connor, T. S. J. (2026). Weaving the Sacred and the Psychological: A Practice-Based Study of How Practitioners Conceptualize Spiritually Integrated Psychotherapy. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01377-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01377-w

Keywords: spiritually integrated psychotherapy, pastoral psychology, qualitative research, person-centered therapy, clinical training, spirituality, psychotherapy, practice-based evidence, spiritual care, mental health, two-eyed seeing, wholistic personhood

The research draws on the National Study of Catholic Priests, a collaboration between the Catholic University of America and Gallup that constitutes the largest nationally representative survey of American Catholic priests in more than half a century. The baseline wave was collected between February and June 2022 from a stratified random sample of priests drawn from the Official Catholic Directory, a comprehensive listing of the U.S. priesthood. From a sampling frame of 26,807 priests, 10,000 were selected and 3,516 completed the first survey. A follow-up wave, fielded by Gallup between May 12 and June 30, 2025, recontacted those priests and produced 1,164 usable responses, yielding a final analytic sample of 1,056 priests with valid data at both time points. Because predictors were measured in 2022 and loneliness was measured in 2025, the design allows genuinely lagged analysis, a substantial advance over the cross-sectional and qualitative studies that have dominated research on clergy well-being.

Loneliness was measured using the widely validated three-item UCLA Loneliness Scale, which asks how often respondents feel they lack companionship, feel left out, and feel isolated from others. On average, priests reported relatively low to moderate loneliness, but with meaningful variation across the sample. The study’s central premise is that this variation is patterned and predictable. Priests represent what researchers call a paradigmatic case of relational asymmetry: their ministry is intensely social, filled with pastoral care, sacramental duties, and congregational leadership, yet their vocational commitments, including celibacy, frequent parish reassignment, and hierarchical constraints, limit access to the intimate and reciprocal relationships that buffer against emotional loneliness. A priest can be surrounded by hundreds of parishioners each week and still feel profoundly alone.

The first major set of findings concerns psychological well-being. Priests who scored higher on the Harvard Flourishing Index in 2022, a composite measure capturing life satisfaction, happiness, physical and mental health, sense of purpose, and the quality of their relationships, reported significantly lower loneliness three years later. A one-unit increase in flourishing on the ten-point scale corresponded to a 0.19-point decrease in loneliness, a meaningful shift given the compressed range of the outcome. This pattern is consistent with the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, which holds that people with higher well-being are better equipped to build and sustain social resources over time. Flourishing priests may interpret interactions more positively, invest more in relationships, and remain more emotionally available to others, creating a virtuous cycle of connection.

The reverse also holds, and with striking force. Priests reporting greater psychological distress at baseline, measured with the Kessler-6 screening tool covering nervousness, hopelessness, restlessness, depression, and worthlessness, showed the largest increase in subsequent loneliness of any predictor in the study, with a coefficient of 0.37. Burnout, assessed with items adapted from the Maslach Burnout Inventory, also predicted higher loneliness. This makes sense given the emotional labor inherent to priesthood: priests are expected to comfort the grieving, mediate conflicts, and embody spiritual authority, often while suppressing their own emotional needs. Emotional exhaustion erodes the capacity for empathy and engagement, while depersonalization fosters detachment and cynicism, gradually hollowing out the relational quality of a priest’s interactions until withdrawal follows. Notably, demographic characteristics such as age, race, nativity, and years in the diocese showed little consistent association with loneliness, suggesting that psychological conditions matter far more than background factors.

Institutional support emerged as a second crucial pillar, but its protective power depended dramatically on the source. Support from fellow priests proved to be the most consequential social resource: priests reporting strong peer support reported loneliness levels substantially lower than those with little or no support, with the association growing steadily stronger at each level of support. Peer relationships offer something that relationships with bishops and parishioners cannot: a space free of role asymmetry where priests can be vulnerable, share the particular struggles of their vocation, and receive understanding from people who live the same reality. The author suggests that variation in collegial networks may represent a central axis of inequality within the priesthood, with well-integrated priests enjoying durable protection while isolated colleagues face heightened risk.

Support from bishops also predicted lower loneliness, though with smaller effect sizes, likely because hierarchical power dynamics constrain openness and genuine emotional exchange. Support from parishioners showed the weakest and least consistent associations, with only strong parish support reaching statistical significance. Priests may feel constrained in expressing vulnerability to the people they lead, limiting how deeply these relationships can alleviate isolation. The pattern carries a practical message: horizontal bonds among peers appear more protective than vertical or role-bound relationships, and dioceses seeking to reduce clergy loneliness may do well to invest in structures that foster genuine peer connection rather than relying on formal supervisory relationships.

The spiritual findings were equally nuanced. Over 91 percent of the priests affirmed that the Eucharist is the center of their lives, and those who did so reported significantly lower subsequent loneliness, a reduction of 0.25 points compared to priests who did not affirm Eucharistic centrality. The Eucharist, which Catholic theology describes as the source and summit of Catholic life, is an inherently communal and embodied ritual involving physical presence, shared participation, and repeated coordination with a community of believers. For priests, who act as officiants mediating between the divine and the congregation, the Eucharist may provide a dual defense against loneliness: a sense of transcendent connection and a reinforced collective identity within the Church. In contrast, time spent in private prayer, whether fifteen minutes or more than an hour daily, showed no significant association with future loneliness. Private devotion may offer emotional comfort, but it apparently cannot substitute for the relational and communal dimensions of spiritual life.

The broader implication is that loneliness is best understood not as a static condition but as a temporally unfolding process shaped by the accumulation of psychological, institutional, and spiritual experiences. Two men entering the priesthood under identical structural constraints, celibacy, mobility, and demanding workloads, may follow very different trajectories depending on their psychological resources, the strength of their peer networks, and the depth of their engagement with communal ritual. This reframing matters for policy and formation. Seminaries and dioceses that cultivate flourishing, monitor for early distress and burnout, and deliberately build peer-support structures may be acting on some of the most powerful known predictors of long-term well-being among clergy. The findings also resonate beyond the Church, suggesting that in any highly relational occupation where emotional labor is intense and intimate support is constrained, communal and embodied forms of engagement, not solitary coping, are what keep isolation at bay. Loneliness among those who shepherd others, the study concludes, is not inevitable; it is contingent on the social and spiritual architecture surrounding them.

Subject of Research: Longitudinal predictors of loneliness among Catholic priests in the United States

Article Title: Lonely Shepherds? A Longitudinal Study of the Social, Psychological, and Spiritual Predictors of Loneliness among Catholic Priests in the United States

Article References: Upenieks, L. (2026). Lonely Shepherds? A Longitudinal Study of the Social, Psychological, and Spiritual Predictors of Loneliness among Catholic Priests in the United States. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01373-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01373-0

Keywords: loneliness, Catholic priests, clergy well-being, social support, burnout, psychological distress, flourishing, Eucharist, prayer, longitudinal study, pastoral psychology, mental health

The study arrives against the backdrop of psychology’s much-discussed replication crisis, which erupted in the early 2010s when large-scale efforts to reproduce classic findings returned weaker or null results. Since then, researchers including Fradera, Maxwell and colleagues, Fletcher, Plucker and Makel, Pennington and Bogdan have argued that careful, systematic replication is the only dependable foundation on which theory, and ultimately practical intervention, can be built. The new work was designed precisely for that purpose: to replicate an earlier 2021 study by Francis, Crea and Laycock that had validated the Francis Burnout Inventory Revised among 287 Italian Catholic priests, this time with a different sample of participants and a rigorous statistical re-test of the model’s central claims.

To understand what was tested, it helps to see how the two leading burnout instruments for clergy differ. The Maslach Burnout Inventory, long the dominant tool in occupational psychology, operationalises burnout through three scales measuring emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation and reduced personal accomplishment, with a theory rooted in developmental progression: exhaustion is assumed to lead to depersonalisation, which in turn erodes a sense of accomplishment. The Francis Burnout Inventory takes a different route, built on the balanced affect model originally proposed by Bradburn in 1969. That model contests the assumption that positive and negative affect sit at opposite poles of one continuum, proposing instead that they function as partially independent systems. A person can, in principle, hold high levels of both at the same time, and the balance between them determines psychological outcomes.

Translated into practice, the Francis Burnout Inventory Revised comprises two 10-item scales: the Scale of Emotional Exhaustion in Ministry, known as the SEEM, and the Satisfaction in Ministry Scale, known as the SIMS. Each item is rated on a five-point scale from agree strongly to disagree strongly. The theoretical pay-off of this design is that it points toward actionable interventions. If positive affect can buffer the damage done by negative affect, then programmes that help clergy identify and amplify sources of satisfaction in their work may be more realistic than attempts to strip away the embedded triggers of exhaustion, which are often structural features of pastoral life rather than removable irritants.

Before the present replication, a substantial body of evidence had already begun to accumulate around the balanced affect model. Studies showing that the two affect measures respond to different predictors have included findings that satisfaction in ministry is unrelated to age while emotional exhaustion declines with age among Catholic priests in Italy, Methodist ministers in Britain and Catholic priests in Portugal. Religious coping strategies have been found to enhance positive affect without touching negative affect, and intriguing work on the Dark Triad of subclinical personality traits, operationalised through the Short Dark Triad measure, has shown that narcissism correlates positively with both exhaustion and satisfaction, a pattern that is difficult to reconcile with a single-continuum view of burnout. Meanwhile, eight previous studies testing the buffering hypothesis, spanning Presbyterian clergy in the United States, Anglican clergy in England and Wales, Methodist ministers in Great Britain, and Catholic priests and religious sisters in Italy and Portugal, had all supported the model using dependent variables ranging from thoughts of leaving ministry and psychosomatic ailments to recognised wellbeing scales.

The new study recruited its 264 participants through a snowball sampling technique administered by a team of trainee psychologists at the Pontifical Salesian University in Rome. Participation was voluntary, confidential and anonymous. The resulting sample ranged in age from 25 to 84 years: 130 priests were under 40, 73 were in their 40s, 36 in their 50s, 13 in their 60s and 11 aged 70 or over, with one participant not recording his age. In all, 150 served as diocesan priests and 114 as religious priests, and while 117 were Italian, 147 came from other nationalities, underscoring the international character of the priesthood in Italy. Alongside the burnout measure, the researchers administered the 12-item Purpose in Life Scale developed by Robbins and Francis, a unidimensional instrument rooted in the logotherapy tradition of Viktor Frankl, which assesses the sense of meaning and purpose in life.

The statistical analysis proceeded in three stages using the SPSS package. The first examined internal consistency reliability, and the results were satisfactory across the board. The SEEM achieved a Cronbach alpha of .82, the SIMS an alpha of .84, and the Purpose in Life Scale also performed well, consistent with the alpha of .90 reported for its Italian translation in earlier validation work. Item–rest-of-scale correlations fell between .39 and .62 for the SEEM and .41 and .62 for the SIMS, indicating homogeneity within each scale. Purpose in life scores correlated positively with satisfaction in ministry and negatively with emotional exhaustion, supporting the appropriateness of purpose in life as the dependent variable for testing the balanced affect model.

The second stage of analysis probed the individual items and revealed a strikingly textured portrait of priestly life in the sample. On the negative side, 16.3 percent of the priests reported that fatigue and irritation had become part of their daily experience, 14.8 percent reported feeling drained by fulfilling their ministry role, and 14.4 percent said they were less patient with those among whom they minister than they used to be, suggesting that up to one in seven priests recognised signs of burnout. On the positive side, the picture was overwhelmingly encouraging: 88.7 percent said they were really glad they had entered the ministry, 85.8 percent gained a great deal of personal satisfaction from their ministry roles, and 81.8 percent felt very positive about their current ministry. Most priests, in other words, are simultaneously carrying meaningful levels of exhaustion and high levels of satisfaction, precisely the co-occurrence the balanced affect model predicts and the single-continuum view struggles to accommodate.

The third and most consequential stage tested the buffering hypothesis directly through a series of multiple regression models, with purpose in life as the dependent variable and age, exhaustion, satisfaction and their interaction entered in sequence. Age proved statistically non-significant and was dropped, and once the interaction term was included the independent effect of satisfaction no longer held, leaving a parsimonious model in which the effect of exhaustion on purpose in life depends on the level of satisfaction. The interaction was highly significant: the mitigating effect of satisfaction in ministry on purpose in life scores grew stronger as emotional exhaustion increased. In the fitted model, the negative effects of exhaustion could, on average, be completely eliminated at the highest levels of satisfaction. Among the ten priests in the sample with the maximum observed satisfaction score of 50, the individual with the highest exhaustion score of 23 also recorded the highest possible purpose in life score of 60, a vivid illustration of satisfaction acting as a psychological shield.

The authors are careful to acknowledge three limitations that should shape future replications. First, the snowball sampling technique, while adequate for testing associations within the sample, does not permit generalisation to the wider population of Catholic priests in Italy, a caveat reinforced by the sample’s relatively young age profile; caution is needed before extending the pastoral implications to older priests. Second, the study relied on a single dependent measure, and multiple indicators would strengthen the security of the findings. Third, the choice of the Purpose in Life Scale carries a conceptual wrinkle, since the satisfaction measure itself contains references to work-related purpose, potentially overlapping with the outcome. Even so, the replication is a notable victory for methodological rigour and for the balanced affect framework. Its practical message is concrete: rather than trying to eliminate the intractable stressors of ministry, programmes of continuing personal and professional development may achieve more by helping clergy recognise and maximise the sources of satisfaction in their calling, turning positive affect into a deliberate safeguard against burnout.

Subject of Research: Construct validity and reliability of the Francis Burnout Inventory Revised and the balanced affect model of burnout among Catholic priests in Italy.

Article Title: A Replication Study Testing the Construct Validity and Internal Consistency Reliability of the Francis Burnout Inventory Revised Among Catholic Priests in Italy

Article References: Francis, L. J., Crea, G., McKenna, U., & Laycock, P. (2026). A Replication Study Testing the Construct Validity and Internal Consistency Reliability of the Francis Burnout Inventory Revised Among Catholic Priests in Italy. Pastoral Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-026-01376-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01376-x

Keywords: balanced affect, Catholic priests, burnout, emotional exhaustion, satisfaction in ministry, Francis Burnout Inventory Revised, purpose in life, replication study, psychometrics, clergy wellbeing, pastoral psychology, Italy