Social Justice in the Work of Women Healthcare Chaplains: A Feminist Analysis of Spiritual Activism

Abstract

In the fraught and intimate context of healthcare, women chaplains provide spiritual care to the suffering. In addition to listening and prayer, their spiritual care is often focused on equity and inclusion such as advocacy for the vulnerable amid broader social and economic crises. This article draws on data from qualitative interviews conducted with women healthcare chaplains in London, England and Vancouver, Canada. We note that while social structures affect disadvantages among healthcare constituents, women healthcare chaplains challenge these inequities through a spiritual care based in a transformative spirituality for social justice. We understand such forms of spiritual care as ‘spiritual activism’ building on the work of Anzaldúa (2002), Keating (2005) and Fernandes (2003) via an intersectional framing (Crenshaw, 1989). Expanding on this critical feminist work, we demonstrate contemporary workings of spiritual activism among women healthcare chaplains, which can alter the often-perceived divisions between religion and feminism, offer overlooked directions of analysis for chaplaincy studies, and highlight a group of women that have received scant attention in feminist and religious studies.