Is hospitality enough for Interfaith Spiritual Care by Christians?

ABSTRACT

This paper is largely theoretical. The main concerns are not the ‘hows’ of Interfaith Spiritual Care, but answers to several questions: (1) What are the main approaches to ISC? (2) Are there any common features among these approaches? If so, what are the commonalities? (3) Is there a colonizing tendency inscribed in these approaches that one should be cautious about in the Asian context? (4) How might one decolonize such approaches for the Asian world? These four questions are not unrelated. Rather, together they form the major research question raised in this paper: How should Christian ISC caregivers decolonize the existing western ISC approaches to make them religio-culturally sound in the non-Christian Asian context? To answer question 3 and 4, it provides a more detailed analysis of a hospitality approach to ISC as an example. Throughout this paper, the increasing demands on Christian caregivers to engage in ISC are assumed. The paper concludes with some general suggestions for ISC in a world where Christianity is de facto a guest.

KEYWORDS:

• Christian Interfaith Spiritual Care
• Christian chaplaincy
• interfaith hospitality
• Asian experience
• decolonization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In a previous work of mine, a concrete clinical conversation is given to illustrate how mismatching it could be when a non-Christian patient is treated as a guest by a hospital chaplain working in an ISC setting in a non-Christian world. See Kwan (2018, 17–18).

2 While churches in Hong Kong run many schools and hospitals thanks to its colonial past, Christianity is still widely regarded as a western, foreign religion. So, even churches are institutional hosts of a variety of social services, they are regarded only as organizations owned by a foreign religion – a guest on the religio-cultural level, which, for some historical reasons, is assigned the role of a service provider.

Additional information

Funding

The work described herein is fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region [Project Number: 14620419]; Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee.

Notes on contributors

Simon Shui-Man Kwan

Simon Shui-Man Kwan is Professor at the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He also serves as Associate Director (Academic Affairs) of the Divinity School of Chung Chi College, CUHK, and Editor of the journal QUEST: Studies on Religion & Culture in Asia from the Divinity School. KWAN is President of the Asia Academy of Practical Theology (HONG KONG), and former Chair of the Programme for Theology and Culture in Asia. He is author of Postcolonial Resistance and Asian Theology (London; New York: Routledge, 2014) & Negotiating a Presence-Centred Christian Counselling: Towards a Theologically Informed and Culturally Sensitive Approach (Newcastle: CSP, 2016).