Postcolonial Practices of Care: A Project of Togetherness During Covid-19 and Racial Violence - Paperback

by Hellena Moon (Editor), Emmanuel Y. Lartey (Editor), Gary Y. Okihiro (Foreword by)

This anthology seeks to theorize a method of a radical, decolonial spiritual-care paradigm that can chart a new course in defining--or reframing--what is "spiritual," what is theological, and what is "care." Postcolonial Practices of Care presents voices of educators, chaplains, students, human-rights and disability activists, and other professionals to highlight the problems of disciplinary divides and binaries--such as pastoral/spiritual or ordinary/sacred. In focusing on the practices of care during the pandemic, the editors see their book as contributing to ongoing paradigm shifts and the importance of decoloniality as a method in the field of pastoral care. The praxis of spiritual care addresses--and interrogates--the history of spiritual violence and its imbrication with modernity/coloniality, colonialism, racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and (conscious and unconscious) white Christian supremacy that constructed not only the pastoral and the spiritual but also its divide: the pastoral/spiritual. Such a framework focuses on "religious" difference without probing or critiquing how those differences have reified hierarchies of superiority or sustained ideologies of Euro-centric monocultural ethnocentrism. We want to emphasize the shared practices that bring us together as human beings on Earth rather than to prove we are better, or more unique, than one another.

Author Biography

Hellena Moon is part-time Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department. She is the co-editor of Postcolonial Images of Spiritual Care: Challenges of Care in a Neoliberal Age.



Emmanuel Y. Lartey is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Pastoral Theology and Spiritual Care at the Candler School of Theology and the Graduate Division of Religion at Emory University. He is the author of six books, including In Living Color: An Intercultural Approach to Pastoral Care and Counseling.