Spirituality/religiosity's influence on college students' adjustment to bereavement: A systematic review

Ready to Meet God? Faithfulness and the Death of a Loved One

Religiosity often predicts better adjustment after the death of a loved one, but findings vary. One source of variability could be the perceived faithfulness of the deceased. In study 1, more religious college students found the death of a hypothetical faithful person to be less sad than the death of a hypothetical unfaithful person, whereas less religious college students did not. In study 2, MTurk participants and highly religious Christians reported that the death of a faithful loved one was less difficult than the death of an unfaithful loved one, but the difference was greater for the highly religious Christians.

The Role of Spirituality during Suicide Bereavement: A Qualitative Study

Background: A loved one’s loss due to suicide can be a traumatic experience and trigger a complex grief process. Although spirituality, defined as a search for the Sacred in a broad sense, can be a resource and an obstacle in coping with the suicide bereavement process, there is a gap in scientific understanding of the role spirituality plays during the process. Methods: To explore the role of spirituality in people bereaved by suicide, we recruited 11 women who lost a life partner due to suicide. We conducted semi-structured interviews and analyzed the data using reflexive thematic analysis. Results: We identified the following three themes: spirituality is a supportive resource that can be reached for or achieved without conscious involvement; spirituality provides helpful ways to cope with grief; spirituality makes the grief process more difficult. Conclusions: Spirituality, if personally meaningful and supported by others, can function as a resource after a loved one’s suicide and even add to post-traumatic growth after the loss. On the contrary, spirituality-related issues, such as stigmatization and a lack of personally meaningful traditions, can distress the bereaved. Difficult spiritual experiences and questions can become an intricate part of the grief process.

Belonging to the World through Body, Trust, and Trinity: Climate Change and Pastoral Care with University Students

This article explores how pastoral care is performed in an age of climate change. University students suffer from a wide range of stresses, reducing their well-being. Climate change compounds these stress reactions, even where students are not directly affected. As climate change affects concrete, material matters, human reactions to it may no longer be viewed and treated as purely inner psychic states. Thus, climate change disrupts usual divisions of material, social, and mental features as separate categories, underscoring instead the close-knit relations between them. Given the far-reaching ways climate change affects mental health, the article presents an ethnographical-theologically-driven model for basic conversation in pastoral care with students in the midst of escalating climate events. Making use of theories from anthropology, psychology, and theology, this article builds on in-depth interviews with Danish university chaplains about their pastoral care with students. The model extrapolates from these theories how pastoral care may support students in the era of climate change through a triad of organizing themes that come to the fore in the interviews: “Mothering the Content”, “Loving Vital Force”, and “Befriending the Environment”.

Spirituality and Religiosity during Suicide Bereavement: A Qualitative Systematic Review

A loved one’s loss to suicide can be a traumatic experience and trigger a difficult grief process, identity changes, a loss of the sense of meaning and a spiritual crisis. Spirituality and/or religiosity (S/R) can be both an important resource and a source of stigmatisation during suicide bereavement. This study aims to synthesise the extant findings about S/R during suicide bereavement in qualitative studies. After an exhaustive selection of articles, the current review utilised a total of 484 citations and seven studies. A thematic synthesis yielded five major themes related to S/R during suicide bereavement: the need to be helped by the religious community without being judged; S/R-related experience of the deceased as a figure who continues to exist; S/R experienced without a conscious choice; conscious reach towards S/R themes; not relating to S/R during suicide bereavement. These findings indicate that the role of S/R during suicide bereavement is complex and varies from providing help to serving as a source of suffering. Hence, practitioners and religious communities should be mindful of the S/R themes during suicide bereavement.