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Book Cover
E-book
Author Beedon, David Kirk, author

Title Pastoral care for the incarcerated : hope deferred, humanity diminished? / David Kirk Beedon
Published Cham : Palgrave Macmillan, [2022]
©2022

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Description 1 online resource (xi, 270 pages : illustrations)
Contents Introduction: Where and How to Start -- Part I. Defining the issue -- Modern Mass Incarceration: Can it Be Humanised? -- A Case in Point: A Socio-Historical Critique of Indeterminate Sentences -- Part II: Describing the context -- Entering Lived Experience: From Theory to Reality -- Tales From the Shadow of Despair -- Part III: Reflecting on practice -- Seeking humanity and hope -- A pastoral response -- Part IV: Acting compassionately -- Custodial compassion: a pastoral paradox -- Loose ends, disappearances and leavings: a reflective pastoral epilogue
Summary This important, lucid book burns with compassion for those incarcerated in prisons, seeking to find authentic, realistic ways of enhancing humanity and hope in constrained, inadequate environments. Beedons well-researched text uniquely illuminates the situation of the many prisoners still held under indeterminate sentences in the UK, some of whom are encountered in their own words. It will be vital reading for prison chaplains and pastoral theorists as well as politicians, policy makers and those involved in justice systems around the world. Passion, analysis, realism and imagination meet here to create a salutary, inspiring read for anyone wanting to extend their understanding of prisons, criminals, pastoral care and sensitive research together with our common human frailty and potential. Stephen Pattison, Emeritus Professor of Religion, Ethics and Practice, University of Birmingham, UK This book is a work of profound humane regard. It takes the loss of hope as its starting point and finds its way through the dark to a place of possibility. The author bears witness to men serving indeterminate prison sentences for public protection. Using found poems, and his own compassion, he describes the mens suffering, some ways forward, and a much-needed form of pastoral care. Alison Liebling, Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Cambridge, UK This book explores and formulates a response to the question: How best can those held in modern systems of mass incarceration be cared for pastorally when many prisons diminish both hope and humanity? Employing the multi-disciplinary approach of practical theology, this ethnographic enquiry will be a guide for chaplains and all who strive to embody compassion wherever human flourishing is undermined. The books structure follows the pastoral cycle method from practical theology, remaining context-based and practice-focused throughout. Pastoral insights are illustrated with personal, poetic and movingly reflective material drawn from the lived experience of indeterminately sentenced men who did not know if or when they would be ever released. The author, a former prison chaplain, remains reflexively and humanely present in the text, modelling the profound humane regard and pastoral presence that is central to this work. This book will take the reader deeply into penal spaces on a journey of both compassion and hope. David Kirk Beedon is an Anglican Priest and former chaplain in Her Majestys Prison and Probation Service in England and Wales. In 2020 he was awarded a Doctorate in Practical Theology for his prison-based research
Notes Includes index
Online resource; title from PDF title page (SpringerLink, viewed November 22, 2022)
Subject Prisoners -- Religious life.
Religious work with prisoners.
Prisoners -- Religious life
Religious work with prisoners
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9783031132728
3031132726