Intentional friendship : a philosophy of pastoral care

Pastoral care or its equivalent is part of the traditional means by which people within a community attempt to remain connected to each other positively and personally. Such personal community is modelled on the family; and the original pastoral carers are the parents of a well functioning family. In so far as God or the gods are then seen as standing in relation to the community as parents stand in relation to a family, so pastoral care has been founded in religion and theology. Its theoretical basis is centred in the attempt to think an adequate conception of God as a symbol of the community’s unity of will and purpose. Intentional Friendship: A Philosophy of Pastoral Care proposes such a theoretical base, centred in the attempt to think an adequate conception of the Self rather than God as a symbol of personal and cultural unity; such a conception must necessarily include the capacities for moral, aesthetic and intellectual judgments as distinctive of being a human person. The thesis proposes a conception of the Self as Agent as being adequate to a philosophy of pastoral care in a secular, multifaith society. Such a conception contains within it the conceptions of the Self as Subject and the Self as Object. Thinking then of the Self from the point of view of action enables the instituting of primary friendship as the central concept of personal community and pastoral care; a re-thinking of the relationship between religion, the arts and the sciences; the re-conception of religion as the processes governing interpersonal relationships, including the extension of those relationships out into idealized Others such as saints, gods and God; and the detailed analysis of the relationship between action and reflection as found ubiquitously in life and very specifically and consciously in Clinical Pastoral Education, the primary form of training in pastoral care in Australia. The adequacy of this theory or philosophy for multifaith pastoral care is tested in a pilot multifaith training group. In general terms the philosophy was found to contain and not conflict with the various traditions represented in the group. It was seen as an adequate basis to further explore multifaith chaplaincy and pastoral care within a society such as we have in Australia