Sally Nelson

Patients and their families are often concerned to find a material cause for suffering rather than to accept the mystery of its ontological necessity. In modern healthcare settings, in which medicine is rightly based upon the reductionist empirical scientific method, spirituality is therefore likely to be seen as a bolt-on extra to medical care rather than as a truly alternative worldview. In this article I argue that suffering needs to be rehabilitated as an experience rather than a cosmic mistake, and that chaplains are better equipped than medical staff to offer this insight into transcendent reality.

AbstractThe University of ManchesterSally NelsonDoctor of PhilosophyConfronting ?meaningless? suffering: from suffering-as-insult to suffering-as-ontological-impertinence2010From the personal contemporary pastoral experience of caring for dying people, and with particular attention given to the psychospiritual anguish often associated with the perceived failure of death, I argue that suffering is primarily identified in the modern West as an insult to normality, often expressed in various forms of the question: ?Why me??. I challenge this view of ?suffering as insult? by selectively identifying and critiquing some culturally embedded views of the nature of reality, taking note of the influence on suffering persons of the dialogue between science and faith in the UK, and by introducing dialogue with the process thought of Whitehead as an alternative to traditional theistic models of God. Such a dialogue also affects the nature of the person conceived in imago dei, and so I examine th...

Abstract: Patients and their families are often concerned to find a material cause for suffering rather than to accept the mystery of its ontological necessity. In modern healthcare settings, in which medicine is rightly based upon the reductionist empirical scientific method, ...