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Systems and Psyches: a Pastoral Perspective on Nathan Carlin’s Pastoral Aesthetics

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Abstract

As a parish minister, the author puts Nathan Carlin’s correlational work between principlist bioethics and pastoral theology, Pastoral Aesthetics, into conversation with his own experiences in congregational life. Focusing on Carlin’s analyses of the pastoral images of the living human web and the living human document, the author argues for combining these two images in order for the intricacies and contradictions of human desire to be taken into account when understanding our motivations around issues of justice and oppression. Specifically, this combination would allow for more truth-telling and self-examination within majority-white communities such as the author’s own progressive parish, where white-identified congregants are encouraged to delve deeply into their own formation in racist systems and culture.

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Notes

  1. I should also mention that Bonnie Miller-McLemore was my doctoral advisor, and, in fact, it was her early essay that first led me to apply to the program that she led at Vanderbilt University. I have worked with and sought to extend the image in my own work (see Coble, 2016).

  2. I should note that this is not the case later in the chapter, where Carlin (2019) talks about how anti-fat bias combined with systemic racism and ableism may have played a role in Pou’s actions (see p. 134).

  3. In fact, in a later essay Miller-McLemore (2012) wrote of the need to combine the web and the document: “Perhaps these two goals are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps we need to find a fresh way to characterize the field and its focus and say more clearly: our subject matter is the ‘living human document within the web’” (p. 63).

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  1. Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, 789 Merrimon Ave, Asheville, NC, 28804, USA

    Richard Coble

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  1. Richard Coble
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Correspondence to Richard Coble.

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Coble, R. Systems and Psyches: a Pastoral Perspective on Nathan Carlin’s Pastoral Aesthetics. Pastoral Psychol 70, 595–600 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-021-00971-4

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