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Foreword by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore.
How do children challenge theologies and practices of pastoral care? How can chaplains provide compassionate, ethical, and competent spiritual care with children and their communities? How can pastors, families, and hospital care teams participate in the child’s own meaning-making within and for their community?
Joshua T. Morris is a scholar-practitioner who has served as a chaplain for over fifteen years within interreligious, intercultural, and multilingual contexts. Currently an assistant professor at Union Presbyterian Seminary, Morris served in pediatric healthcare for eleven years and has been a board-certified chaplain through the Association of Professional Chaplains (APC) for over a decade.
“Chaplains of all sorts—not only those caring with children and their families—can benefit from this wise and vulnerable book. Centering children’s own voices and concerns, Morris manages to attend simultaneously to the levels of the bedside, the healthcare system and its staff, and neoliberal capitalist distortions of healthcare as factors shaping spiritual care. His emancipatory and critical theology of pediatric chaplaincy can improve care for children while supporting clinical caregivers and their challenging, life-giving work. We have needed a text like this for generations, and Morris offers sensitive, credible, and intentional guidance that will shape the field for decades.”
–Duane R. Bidwell, author, After the Worst Day Ever: What Sick Kids Know about Sustaining Hope in Chronic Illness
“Enter this book at your own risk. ‘In a pediatric hospital,’ Joshua Morris forewarns, ‘it is always a child that dies.’ Never flinching from this devastating premise, Morris draws on his extensive experience as a chaplain and practical theologian to offer at once a primer on ministry with sick and dying children and their families and a harrowing deep dive amid the fallout in search of existential meaning and liberation. No one else could write this book. Prepare to be moved. Prepare to be enlightened.”
–Robert C. Dykstra, Charlotte W. Newcombe Professor of Pastoral Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary
