The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Spirituality and Social Work

Beth R. Crisp, Beth R. Crisp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317395423
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This international volume provides a comprehensive account of contemporary research, new perspectives and cutting-edge issues surrounding religion and spirituality in social work. The introduction introduces key themes and conceptual issues such as understandings of religion and spirituality as well as definitions of social work, which can vary between countries. The main body of the book is divided up into sections on regional perspectives; religious and spiritual traditions; faith-based service provision; religion and spirituality across the lifespan; and social work practice. The final chapter identifies key challenges and opportunities for developing both social work scholarship and practice in this area.

Including a wide range of international perspectives from Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Israel, Malta, New Zealand, South Africa, Sweden, the UK and the USA, this Handbook succeeds in extending the dominant paradigms and comprises a mix of authors including major names, significant contributors and emerging scholars in the field, as well as leading contributors in other fields of social work who have an interest in religion and spirituality.

The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Spirituality and Social Work is an authoritative and comprehensive reference for academics and researchers as well as for organisations and practitioners committed to exploring why, and how, religion and spirituality should be integral to social work practice.

Part I
Introduction

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1
Religion and spirituality in social work

Creating an international dialogue

Beth R. Crisp

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Introduction

The last two decades have witnessed a growing interest in the role of religion and spirituality in social work practice in many countries, including places where for much of the twentieth century, social work sought to distance itself from its religious roots. Indeed, all 40 chapters in this volume were authored or co-authored by social workers, enabling the expression of explicitly social work perspectives on religion and spirituality. This includes chapters contributed by authors whose professional legacy included having made a significant contribution to this growing recognition of the legitimate place that religion and spirituality have in professional social work, including Alean Al-Krenawi, Sara Ashencaen Crabtree, Ed Canda, Philip Gilligan, David Hodge and Michael Sheridan. However, readers with a keen knowledge of this field may also have observed some significant omissions from the author list, which reflects that several of those who have pioneered this work over the last two decades are reaching the age of retirement from professional work and were, for various reasons, unable to be part of this project. Nevertheless, the impact of their work is evident in both explicit discussions of the work of John Coates by Mishka Lysack, and also by Fred Besthorn and Jon Hudson, and also in the lists of references of many chapters, where readers will find evidence of the influence of scholars such as John Graham and Margaret Holloway.

There is always the possibility that once a group of prominent scholars who have been passionate about a field of research move on, that work in this field falls away. This volume includes several contributions from emerging social work researchers, many of whom have only recently completed doctoral studies, and whose contributions are expanding the dimensions of our understandings as to the relationship between social work and religion and spirituality. Contributions by early career researchers include chapters by Linda Benavides, Heather Boynton, Patricia Carlisle, Malabika Das, John Fox, James Lucas and Claudia Psaila. It should be noted there were other early career researchers who indicated a desire to be involved in this international project but were told by their employers that any publishing efforts should only be in journals, even if these were aimed at a national, rather than international, readership. Thankfully, this only applied to a few potential contributors, but contributes to the difficulty in creating international dialogue among social workers researching religion and spirituality.

Despite there now being a much wider recognition that religion and spirituality can make a very positive contribution to wellbeing for individuals and communities, the professional imagination as to what this might involve has frequently been confined by the known worlds of those social workers engaged in this quest to legitimise the place of religion and spirituality within the profession. Hence, much of the professional literature on religion, spirituality and social work has focussed on particular situations, stages of life or fields of practice:

• end of life care and bereavement

• treatment for substance misuse

• issues in migration, including issues for refugee and asylum seekers

• religion as problematic particularly in respect of mental health, providing care to children and hindering health promotion efforts associated with sexuality and sexual behaviours

• attitudes of religious social workers/social work students, which are conservative, judgmental or oppressive.

To a large extent, these emphases reflect the concerns of social workers in North America and the United Kingdom, whose voices dominate the international social work literature more generally (McDonald et al. 2003) and where, perhaps unsurprisingly, much of the readily available writing on religion, spirituality and social work to date has originated. While we have to thank authors in these countries for what many consider some of the seminal books and articles in this field, the extent to which their writings apply to ethnic and religious minorities in their own countries has been questioned (Regan et al. 2013).

Once implicit expectations of the homogeneity of social work practice between countries (Healy 2007) are increasingly acknowledged as unrealistic (Hugman et al. 2010). Furthermore, in many countries, social workers now accept that uncritical adoption of ideas about social work from North America and the United Kingdom can readily result in the privileging of Western values concerning social work (Mwansa 2011; Singh et al. 2011), even though this may be unintentional. This is most apparent when these values clash with those of another society in which the dominant religious culture is not Christianity (Holtzhausen 2011).

In seeking to provide an overview of the literature on religion, spirituality and social work, this volume seeks to challenge and extend the dominant paradigms by including authors from a broader range of countries rather than ‘replicating a familiar process of colonial and post-colonial transfer of policy knowledge, processes, and practices’ (McDonald et al. 2003: 193). Notwithstanding the need for social workers to take account of culturally-specific factors that impact on practice in their local context (Gray and Fook 2004), by offering an examination and discussion of new perspectives, it is envisaged that this volume will stimulate and provoke the social work community to further develop its thinking and practice regarding religion and spirituality. However, for this hope to be realised, readers may need to engage with ideas that may be unfamiliar, and even uncomfortable:

To accept and incorporate other worldviews into one’s frame of reference is difficult. It is necessary to move beyond “sensitivity” to the cultural views of others. This relates to an introductory comment concerning my own efforts to grapple with the question of the extent to which social work values can be held to be universal. A central challenge is in seeking to identify those aspects of social work that are universal and those which can be accepted as indigenous, including indigenous to the Western world. There may be defining characteristics of social work that hold true in most contexts and there may be defining features of social work that only hold true in a specific context. For example, social work, universally, has concern for those in society who are marginalized, but the ways in which society and social work respond to need varies according to contextual factors including time, history, place and stage of development.

(Brydon 2012: 160–1).

Nevertheless, social workers often readily assume that their local experiences of how social work is practiced are universal (Brydon 2012; McCallum 2001). Consequently, despite not being in the original aims for this volume, inclusion of contributions from diverse countries, probably inevitably, results in the question emerging as to what is social work per se, and not just in relation to religion and spirituality. The various perspectives reflect ‘a growing lack of agreement around the world about what social work is’ (Gray and Fook 2004: 627). For example, readers may observe differences as to the involvement of social workers in different types of work, including different roles and involvements of social workers (Norman and Hintze 2005) and which issues or fields of practice are considered the domain of professional social work (Weber and Bugarszski 2007). The varying role of the state versus other providers in welfare provision (Liedgren 2015) is also apparent. Moreover, although the details may vary between countries, a not uncommon situation is that there are fields of social work practice that are typically regarded as ‘secular’ and others where a place for religion is considered legitimate.

Despite English being the most widely used language in the academic community (Obst and Kuder 2009) and frequently, the language in which non-Anglophones who speak different languages communicate with each other (Harrison 2006), language tends to be ‘the forgotten dimension’ (Ruzzene 1998: 17) in international social work projects. For example, Edward Canda, Jungrim Moon and Kyung Mee Kim note spirituality is a foreign concept and not well understood in Korea.

Many of the key concepts in social work have been framed in English, but adoption in other languages has not always been straightforward (Harrison 2006). It is quite plausible that an even broader range of perspectives could have been presented had there been the resources available to translate contributions from authors who were not able to write in English. Among social workers, there are also some English words that have acquired meanings or connotations that are country-specific (Gray and Fook 2004; Heron and Pilkington 2009). Moreover, there are differences between countries as to what is deemed acceptable or appropriate terminology by social workers (Norman and Hintze 2005; Simpson 2009), and although standardised terms could have been adopted throughout this volume, this becomes another form of colonialisa-tion, which projects such as this are striving to overcome. Moreover, local differences are more apparent when indigenised vocabularies are given voice. This is particularly relevant when it comes to definitions of religion and spirituality.

As Fran Gale and Michael Dudley note, how social workers construct religion and spirituality is a significant factor as to whether religion and spirituality are able to be incorporated into emancipatory forms of social work. While editors can propose definitions that all authors are required to comply with, one of the drawbacks of this approach is that it can lead readers to assume a false homogeneity of understanding about these concepts, by prioritising a viewpoint from a particular country (e.g. Miller 2012). But while more messy for the reader who must engage with multiple understandings, this approach is arguably more meaningful in opening up an international dialogue (Cobb et al. 2012).

Regional perspectives

In their chapter, Arielle Dylan and Bartholemew Smallboy refer to a comment by Edward Said (1993: 7) in which he reflected that ‘none of us is outside or beyond geography’. Collectively, the four chapters in Part II of this volume demonstrate some very different regional contexts in which social workers are grappling with issues of religion and spirituality. The first of these chapters provides a perspective on the complicated relationship between social work, religion and spirituality in Australia, which is the context in which the proposal for this volume was conceived and where much of the work to bring this volume to completion was undertaken. Although a particularly Australian form of social work has developed in response to contextual factors, remnants of the ideologies and models of welfare imported by the early British colonists linger:

most contemporary accounts of welfare tend to privilege the role of the nation state in shaping welfare systems rather than pointing to the role of colonial expansion and other transnational influences. … processes of colonization and decolonization are still prominent in the lives of many people around the world.

(Harrison and Melville 2010: 5)

In Australia, religion was intimately associated with the establishment and maintenance of social and political elites for much of the first two centuries of European colonisation. However, whereas Protestantism was associated with the ruling classes in Australia, its influence in Korea grew as nationalist movements opposed the occupation by Japan and the influx of Christian missionaries after the Korean War. Although religion can be linked with the return to peaceful society after conflict, the division of society and decades of civil unrest and violence in Northern Ireland was marked by religious identification, as Patricia Carlisle discusses in Chapter 4. Then in the final chapter of Part II, Claudia Psaila considers the impact on religious experience on Malta, and how the role of the Roman Catholic Church has seemingly diminished since Malta’s accession into the European Union.

As each of the authors in Part II demonstrate, the local religious culture has implications for social work practice, and comparisons between Australia and Korea demonstrate this. In both Australia and Korea, a majority of individuals acknowledge an affinity with one of a range of religious groups, with no one form of religious belief and expression dominating, and there also being a substantial minority of the population who do not associate with any formal religion, some of whom may nevertheless be partial to forms of spirituality. Furthermore, in both countries, religious organisations play a substantial role in the provision of social welfare services in the broader community and not just to their own members. Reflecting the religious characteristics of the population, in Korea, both Buddhist and Christian welfare organisations are actively involved in welfare provision, whereas in Australia, most welfare provision associated with organised religion has a Christian auspice. Scholarship around spirituality and social work is also developing in both Australia and Korea, but whereas in Korea this tends to be associated with a religion and there are a number of schools of social work that are teaching social work aligned with particular religious viewpoints, Australian social work scholars are almost all located in secular institutions and many are interested in spirituality that transcends or is outside formal religions. Interestingly, the Australian Code of Ethics is much more explicit in its inclusion of religion and spirituality than its Korean counterpart.

Despite religious and spiritual diversity in both Australia and Korea, over the last two decades there has been a growing acceptance as to the legitimacy of religion and spirituality in social work practice. In contrast to these two countries, in which Christianity has become a dominant force only in the last two centuries, Malta and Northern Ireland are both places where Christianity became entrenched early in the Common Era, and both countries in which there is remarkably little social work literature about religion and spirituality. Marginalisation of matters religious or spiritual is common practice in social work in both of these countries, though for very different reasons. In Malta, as was previously the case in Australia, separation from its religious and spiritual roots has been part of the quest for the recognition of social work as a profession. Consequently, religion and spirituality are considered to be private, and religious and spiritual needs as not relevant to social work practice. By way of contrast, social workers in Northern Ireland may well recognise the impact of religion on wellbeing, but the close association between conflict and religion in that country has resulted in social workers considering issues of religion and spirituality too sensitive to raise with service users.

Many other chapters also provide glimpses as to why local concerns and the role of religion and spirituality in the culture must be taken into account by social workers. These include Alean Al-Krenawi’s consideration of social work among Palestinians, Eva Jeppsson Grassman’s discussions of the implications for social worker practice of the Church of Sweden ceasing to be a state church as well as chapters from a number of authors f...