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The following offers a response to the essays in this book forum on Pastoral Aesthetics: A Theological Perspective on Principlist Bioethics.

This essay is an application of a method of inquiry described in Nathan Carlin’s 2019 book Pastoral Aesthetics. In Pastoral Aesthetics, Carlin correlates four principles of bioethics with four images of pastoral care to provide new perspectives on these principles by offering inquiry that is theologically informed, psychologically sophisticated, therapeutically oriented, and experientially grounded. In the epilogue of the book, Carlin notes that other correlations are both possible and desirable. In this essay, another correlation is presented. Specifically, the author positions the bioethics principle of nonmaleficence with Donald Capps’s pastoral image of the agent of hope by exploring Jean-Dominique Bauby’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (1998), a memoir about locked-in syndrome.

In this essay, the author engages the Moses, a sculpture by Michelangelo, as a transformational object. He does so in light of psychoanalytic interpretations of the statue, including Sigmund Freud’s (who referred to his essay on the Moses as “a joke”), as well as three psychoanalytic interpretations after Freud. While drawing on and combining features of all of these psychoanalytic interpretations, the author makes particular use of Moshe Halevi Spero’s interpretation to affirm a reading of the Moses as representing a paternal figure who not only gives up his anger (and power to castrate) but also actively nourishes his children like a nursing mother. The author also understands Freud’s essay on the Moses to be a form of teasing, which, in part, is why it has been a transformational object for him.

Teaching Health Humanities illuminates the theory and practice of health and medical humanities pedagogy as it exists today in a variety of institutional settings. It explores how this pedagogy incorporates emerging media forms and aims to represent a variety of perspectives.

This article focuses on Donald Capps's books on mental illness. In doing so I highlight three key insights from Capps that I have applied in my own ministry with persons with mental illness in various psychiatric hospitals. These insights, together with my own experience as a chaplain, lead to three practical lessons for clinical pastoral education students in psychiatric settings. I provide some context for my interest in mental illness and my friendship with Capps, as well as some background regarding how Capps's writings on mental illness fit with certain broader themes in his own work as a pastoral theologian. This essay is personal throughout.

This essay offers a psychoanalytic reading of Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls , an award-winning novel (which recently has been made into a film) about a 13-year-old boy whose mother is dying of cancer. I use Sigmund Freud’s “On Dreams” to interpret several scenes from the novel, interspersed with lessons from the life of Jesus. I argue that such a reading can help persons of all ages take the emotional lives of teenagers more seriously, specifically by witnessing the depth and complexity of ambivalence as represented in the novel. Also, an important feature in the novel (and a vital congruence between psychoanalysis and the teachings of Jesus) is the transformation of emotional ambivalence into paradoxical truth.

This essay answers the question of the meaning of life. It does so from the perspective of pastoral theology by turning to a children’s story: William Joyce’s award-winning The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore . After the introduction, this essay has two basic parts. The first part describes the context of The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore , summarizes its narrative, and explores its reception. The second part articulates three ways in which The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is suggestive for pastoral theology with regard to questions of meaning—existentially, psychologically, and morally. In doing so, the essay builds on Donald Capps’s insights in The Poet ’ s Gift , assumes the perspective of Victor Frankl as articulated in Man ’ s Search for Meaning , and suggests that the reframing technique of dereflection is especially useful with regard to the preservation of meaning. This essay also includes a considerable amount of primary source material from an interview with William Joyce conducted by the author.

In this position, LaMothe organized and administered the Pastoral Counseling Internship Program at the Louisville Family Counseling Center, and he developed, in collaboration with others, the Certificate in Supervision Program in Pastoral Care and Homiletics for St. Meinrads Continuing Education Department. Ranger, Airborne, Meritorious Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal, and National Defense Service Medal. While he has also written (and will continue to write) in psychology of religion and about clinical issues, his turn toward macro political and economic structures and systems occurred, as he disclosed to me, Baround the time George W. Bush was elected to the presidency by the Supreme Court.^ LaMothe added: BI felt a need to shift my focus from strictly clinical and psychology of * Nathan Carlin Nathan.Carlin@uth.tmc.edu 1 McGovern Center for Humanities and Ethics, The University of Texas Medical School, 6431 Fannin Street JJL 410, Houston, TX 77030, USA http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11089-015-0671-3&domain=pdf Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11089-015-0671-3&domain=pdf Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11089-015-0671-3&domain=pdf Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11089-015-0671-3&domain=pdf Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11089-015-0671-3&domain=pdf Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11089-015-0671-3&domain=pdf Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11089-015-0671-3&domain=pdf Web End = http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s11089-015-0671-3&domain=pdf Web End = Preface: Special Section on Ryan LaMothe 2 Pastoral Psychol (2016) 65:12 religion issues to these other realities of human hope and suffering.

This article summarizes a version of the “mourning religion” thesis—derived from the work of Peter Homans and further developed and advanced by William Parsons, Diane Jonte-Pace, and Susan Henking—and then demonstrates how this thesis can shed light on the Park51 controversy. We argue that the Park51 controversy represents a case of incomplete cultural mourning of an aspect of American civil religion that manifests itself in melancholic rage by means of protests, threats to burn the Qur’an (as well as actual burnings of the Qur’an), and vandalism of mosques around the United States. We explore various losses—military, economic, and symbolic—and note that these losses remain ambiguous, therefore preventing closure and productive mourning. The fact that a permanent memorial still has not been built at Ground Zero reflects, and perhaps exacerbates, this incomplete cultural mourning. Also, the fact that Freedom Tower, the building to replace the Twin Towers, is to be 1776 feet tall reflects that the losses related to 9/11 are connected to American civil religion, as 1776 is a sacred year in American history. Setting aside the ethics and the politics related to this controversy, we attempt here to understand this controversy from a psychoanalytic perspective.