Abstract
Visual culture deeply influences those whom pastoral care providers serve, and contemporary practices with images complicate images’ contribution to personal or social suffering. I begin by describing the mobile, networked dynamics of contemporary visual practices, which include receiving but also creating, curating, and sharing images in emergent and shifting visual communities. I then utilize visual studies theorist Gary Shapiro’s concept of visual regimes, outlining how images work as a kind of soft power that influences the social construction of meaning. I illustrate these practices through a selection of images surrounding the police shooting of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, and the protests and online debates that arose from that tragic event. I suggest throughout this paper that images play a major part in the social construction of subjective worlds and thus contribute both to our suffering and to the meaning we make from our suffering.
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Notes
Currently, there are few writings on pastoral theology and visual culture. A notable exception is Stephen Pattison’s (2007) book Seeing Things and its theory of the haptic object. Pattison utilizes a wide range of sources, from the psychoanalytic to the philosophical, in an attempt to renew our relationship with the things we see in the world.
The “bits” refer to the processing of basic visual information such as color, texture, light, shape, depth, or movement.
For instance, Rick Warren has a Twitter account and runs another account at @pastors that is related to the website pastors.com. Individuals can add “#Pastors” to a twitter post to enter into a broader conversation from an evangelical theological perspective. The Presbyterian Church has its own twitter feed, @Presbyterian, and the United Methodist Church (U.S.A.) has two news accounts, @UMN and @UMCommunications.
Michael Brown was an unarmed African American youth shot by a White police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, evoking protests across the country. The police officer, Darren Wilson, was acquitted of any crime.
Rodney King was videotaped being beaten by Los Angeles police officers in March 1991, leading to riots in Los Angeles.
Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church in Montclair, New Jersey, puts this into practice through their “Signs of the Times” rector’s forum, where news stories—represented by their images—are projected onto a screen and parishioners are invited to enter into discussion and theological reflection on topics of the day and their portrayal in the media.
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Waters, S. All Visual, all the Time: Towards a Theory of Visual Practices for Pastoral Theological Reflection. Pastoral Psychol 65, 849–861 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-016-0711-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-016-0711-7