Pedagogies of Possibilities: Liberating Moral Imagination by Practicing Pastoral Aesthetics

Abstract

The author integrates her clinical ethics training, pastoral theology teaching, and postcolonialism research with concepts of experience-distant and experience-near found in self psychology to illumine pedagogies of possibilities. The article affirms Nathan Carlin’s call in Pastoral Aesthetics for pastoral theology to inform bioethics in paying more attention to living human experiences in order to liberate more expansive practices of moral imagination. Seeing human experiences of suffering and healing as a common text in both pastoral theology and bioethics, the author considers how students, caregivers, and all people might look back at learning encounters (including clinical encounters) and know that learning happened and that it supported well-being.