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ABSTRACT
Amid shifts in religious life on college campuses, chaplains are reenvisioning the meaning of their work. Parsing a set of Howard Thurman’s 1954 university lectures, I display how Thurman articulates a vision for spiritual formation on college campuses, beginning with his descriptions of religious experience. I interpret Thurman in connection with contemporary insights from higher education religious life professionals who describe their work within the university community in similar ways. I suggest that they challenge the institution to take up their role in helping students to integrate their lives, which requires bringing feelings and intellect together. This article considers Howard Thurman’s distinctive contributions to chaplaincy and explores his vocabulary for rethinking meaning-making on campus as the work of spiritual integration.
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Madison Chau for her editing support.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Titles for college and university religious and spiritual life professionals vary by institution, but I use the term ‘chaplain’ throughout the article for quick reference, historical recognition, and for purposes of connecting to other sectors. See Cadge and Rambo, “Introduction” in Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care, 1–18.
2 Cadge and Lawton, “How Does the American Public Understandand and Interact with Chaplains?”; Lawton, “Recipients of Spiritual Care Reflect the Diversity of the Nation.”
3 Lawton, Cadge, and Hamar Martinez, “How Does the American Public Interact.”
4 McGonigle, “Diversifying College and University Chaplaincy.”
5 Gregory C. Ellison organizes his collection on Thurman with sub headings identifying Thurman as an anchor for scholars, activists, and educators. Inspired by Ellison’s framing, I add ‘chaplains’ here. Ellison, Anchored in the Current.
6 Thurman, The Creative Encounter, 9–10.
7 McGarrah Sharp, “Mapping with Care”; Ellison, Anchored in the Current.
8 McGarrah Sharp, “Mapping with Care,” 234. She writes: ‘Howard Thurman is an excellent conversation partner in thinking about what pastoral care that starts from a theological entry point of spirit can look like in practice.’
9 Ellison, Anchored in the Current, 3. Several authors in the collection refer to Thurman’s chaplaincy experience, as well as their own. Overall, the authors point to aspects of Thurman that are vital to his chaplaincy ministry, such as his commitments to interreligious engagement and spiritual formation.
10 Eisenstadt, Against the Hounds of Hell, 277.
11 Ibid.
12 The Papers of Howard Washington Thurman.
13 Thurman, The Creative Encounter, 7.
14 Ibid., 9.
15 It is worth noting that Thurman uses masculine language throughout his writings, which was common for his time. I chose not to continue this practice in interpreting his work.
16 Thurman, The Creative Encounter, 9.
17 McClendon and O’Neal, Philosophy of Religion and the African American Experience, 12. ‘To sum up, there is no attempt to present a technical interpretation of the meaning, definition, or place of religious experience for the formal scholar of religious phenomena. The literature in this field is definitive, if not altogether adequate.’
18 Thurman, The Creative Encounter, 126. Thurman writes: ‘Dr. James Plant in his illuminating study, Personality and the Cultural Pattern, discusses what he calls certain “centering-points” in terms of which a cultural pattern can be understood. In this phase of my discussion I am following his analysis.’
19 Plant, Personality and the Cultural Pattern, 8.
20 Ibid., 11.
21 Thurman, Deep River and the Negro Spiritual Speaks.
22 The language of ecosystem in social work practice seeks to account for multiple factors that shape human behavior and growth. It also opens to consider the impact of enslavement and intergenerational trauma that continues to impact black communities. See Pardeck, “An Ecological Approach for Social Work.”
23 Thurman’s journal entry, titled, ‘On Viewing the Coast of Africa,’ is included ‘in the 1975 collection Deep River and the Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death.’ Thurman, “Preface,” Deep River and the Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death.
24 Thurman, “Preface,” Deep River and the Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death, 5–6.
25 Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited.
26 Thurman contextualizes his study of the spirituals by recalling an experience in college when the choir refused to sing the spiritual, aware of the appropriation of the songs. “General Introduction,” Deep River, 3–4.
27 My presentation of Thurman may suggest that he engaged issues of race more directly than he did. In fact, his reticence is a point of debate and discussion in contemporary scholarship on Thurman.
28 Thurman, The Creative Encounter, 20.
29 Thurman, With Head and Heart, 269.
30 Thurman, The Creative Encounter, 29.
31 Ibid., 30.
32 Ibid., 32.
33 Ibid., 106. He continues: ‘Here the need is for being understood, for being accepted in terms if one’s intrinsic worth rather than merely for what one does or does not … someone cares for you as you without any extras involved.’
34 What is true is not a principle.
35 Thurman, The Creative Encounter, 40.
36 Ibid., 40.
37 Ibid., 77.
38 Ibid., 40.
39 Thurman, With Head and Heart, 222. Thurman borrows this term from Rufus Jones.
40 Ibid., 65.
41 Thurman, The Creative Encounter, 47.
42 Ibid., 90.
43 Thurman’s own vocabulary here, but he is getting at the dangers of letting the perceptions of others direct your life.
44 Thurman, The Creative Encounter, 76.
45 Ibid., 88.
46 Ibid., 90.
47 Ibid., 9.
48 Eisenstadt, Against the Hounds of Hell, 281.
49 Ibid., 281.
50 Ibid., 301. Footnotes 166 and 477. Eisenstadt takes the quote from Thurman’s Chapel Committee meeting minutes from April 29, 1954.
51 Thurman closes The Creative Encounter (page 152, footnote 3): ‘It is not my claim that the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples is such a vital religious fellowship but that it is feeling and believing its way toward that goal.’
52 Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, 70.
53 Thurman, With Head and Heart, 92–93. He writes, ‘At Howard, I began to experiment with forms of worship … I also wanted to develop a service that would permit great freedom of the play of religious imagination, a vesper service; these were called Twilight Hours.’
54 Thurman, Footprints of a Dream, 142. ‘Nothing less than a major revolution in the human spirit can hope to alter this crystallized pattern of behavior … The life of Fellowship Church is but one honest attempt to find a way. The suggestions that follow come out of a life-long wrestling with this sickness in the soul of America.’
55 Thurman, The Creative Encounter, 11.
56 Hagstrom, “Howard Thurman’s Practice of Intimacy.”
57 Thurman, The Creative Encounter, 124.
58 Ibid., 152.
59 Ibid., 12.
60 Ibid., 9.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited, 8.
64 Eisenstadt, Against the Hounds of Hell, 307.
65 We interviewed twelve chaplains from four different sectors of chaplaincy: higher education, healthcare, prison, and military. Their religious affiliations vary: 3 Jewish, 2 Muslim, 1 humanist, 1 Hindu, 1 Protestant (charismatic), and 4 mainline Protestants. We asked these questions about their understandings of suffering and healing, their relationship to their religious or spiritual traditions, and their work within pluralistic settings. Thanks to Mary Page Wilson-Lyons for conducting the interviews.
66 This phrase is my synthesis of Thurman’s description of what happens in religious experience.
67 Steinwert interview.
68 Steinwert interview.
69 Steinwert interview.
70 Steinwert interview.
71 Steinwert interview.
72 Shipman interview.
73 Shipman interview.
74 Shipman interview.
75 Shipman interview.
76 Shipman interview.
77 Shipman interview.
78 Shipman interview.
79 Howard interview.
80 Howard interview.
81 Howard interview.
82 Granshaw, “Woman Battles for 3 Hours to Save Her Stuck Horse from Rising Tide,” Today. https://www.today.com/pets/woman-battles-3-hours-save-her-stuck-horse-rising-tide-243563.
83 Howard interview.
84 Howard interview.
85 Howard interview.
86 Shipman interview.
87 Shipman interview.
88 Howard interview.
89 Steinwert interview.
90 Cadge and Rambo, Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care, 3.
91 Office of the Surgeon General, Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.
92 Cadge and Rambo, Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care. We identify meaning-making as one of three core competencies for all chaplains. The chapters describe various aspects of facilitating meaning-making with care recipients. This set of interviews invites reflection on this meaning-making work from the perspective of chaplains discussing their work. I highlight the ways that they draw from, and repurpose, spiritual and religious traditions in their work. My particular interest, as a theologian, is to make more visible the significance of their ‘creative synthesis,’ using Thurman’s language, that produces a unique theology of chaplaincy.
93 Thurman, The Creative Encounter, 9.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Shelly Rambo
Shelly Rambo is Associate Professor of Theology at Boston University. Her writing and teaching bridges theological understandings of suffering with contemporary clinical discourses in trauma and moral injury. She is the author of Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining and Resurrecting Wounds: Living in the Afterlife of Trauma. She is co-editor with Wendy Cadge of Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care in the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction (UNC Press) and Senior Advisor to Chaplaincy Innovation Lab.