![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This paper considers ways in which churches and individual Christians can respond to the affliction of loneliness. The authors observe that loneliness is not a hopeless state. Rather, there are causes for it which can be addressed. For the individual Christian, there are theological and spiritual resources that can help to move a fact of aloneness from being an experience of loneliness toward an experience of solitude. For both the individual Christian and for others that Christians encounter, the theological concept of Emmanuel is offered as an assurance of God’s presence and understanding of the human condition and as an imperative to form community, a key tool in combatting loneliness. A highly practical, often time-consuming, attitude of love is noted as being essential for pastoral encounters with lonely people, but this can be focused and efficient rather than all-consuming on the part of the pastor.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Leland, “How Loneliness Is Damaging Our Health.”
2 Hamman, “Remembering the Dismembered,” 45ff.
3 Couture, “The Context of Congregations,” [page number].
4 Collins, “A Sermon from Hell,” 70.
5 Gibbes, “A Crisis of Community,” 266f.
6 Stokes, “Margery Kempe: Her Life and the Early History of Her Book,” 27.
7 Gillman and Klimkeit, Christians in Asia Before 1500, 52–56.
8 Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes, 42f.
9 Ibid., 43.
10 Stern, “Back to the Future: Eternal Recurrence and the Death of Socrates,” 77ff.
11 Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1.
12 Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, [page number].
13 Weiss, Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation, 11.
14 Forbes, “Caring for Older People: Loneliness,” 352.
15 Ibid., 253f.
16 Singh, “Loneliness: Dynamics, Dimensions and Many Faces,” 109.
17 Stokes, “The Relation of Social Network and Individual Difference Variables to Loneliness,” [page number].
18 Nathanson, Shame and Pride, [page number].
19 Brown, Daring Greatly, [page number].
20 Heschel, The Prophets, 100.
21 Ibid., 188.
22 Alger, The Solitudes of Nature and of Man, 35.
23 Shelley, Frankenstein, 148.
24 Weisser, “Loneliness, Emptiness, and Wordsworth’s Bliss of Solitude,” 118.
25 Franklin and Tranter, “Loneliness and the Cultural, Spatial, Temporal and Generational Bases of Belonging,” 57.
26 “Loneliness (n.),” Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/word/loneliness.
27 Milton, Tetrachordon, 254.
28 Le Roux, “The Relationship between Loneliness and Christian Faith,” 174.
29 Grenz, Created for Community, chap. 2.
30 Frey, “Professional Loneliness and the Loss of the Doctors’ Dining Room,” [page number].
31 O’Connor, “God with Us,” [page number].
32 Sayers, The Man Born to Be King, 308.
33 Miller, “The Heart of Light,” [page number].
34 Phillips, Your God Is Too Small.
35 Shortt, God Is No Thing, [page number].
36 Lake, “Hope in the Clinical Setting,” 26.
37 Balthasar, Explorations in Theology, vol. 4, 411.
38 Hauerwas, A Community of Character, 1.
39 Day, The Long Loneliness, 286.
40 Mitchell and Anderson, All Our Losses, All Our Griefs, 21.
41 MacKinlay, “Listening to People with Dementia,” 91.
42 Huxley, Brave New World, chap. 8.
43 “Facts and Statistics about Loneliness,” Campaign to End Loneliness. https://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/facts-and-statistics/.
44 Mother Teresa, A Simple Path, 83.
45 Alone with none but thee, my God The hymn is attributed to the Irish monk Saint Columba (c. 521–97).
46 Nouwen, Reaching Out, 27.
47 Limón, Bright Dead Things, 13.
48 Bohm, “Introduction,” 8.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Rob James
Rob James is a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada and is Professor of Anglican Formation and Studies at the Vancouver School of Theology. Previously, he has been a parish priest in Gloucestershire and Canon Chancellor of Wells Cathedral in Somerset, England.
Becca Stevens
Becca Stevens is a priest in the Anglican Church in Wales. She is Ministry Area Leader of Newport North West and Director of Vocations for Monmouth Diocese, and she is an Honorary Canon of St Woolos Cathedral, Newport.