Kevin's Story: Integrating Seminary Formation

Drawing from the four pillars of  formation:human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral, the author reviews a student's formation as she experienced it in his time in seminary

Integrating a Spiritual Care Model within an Accelerated Nursing Curriculum

Creighton University College of Nursing (CON), consistent with the University mission, focuses on the unique journey of each student to seek the truths and values essential to a fulfilling human life. Inspired by this mission, the faculty of the CON decided to integrate spirituality into the one-year accelerated nursing curriculum (ANC). The diversity of the student population, along with the rigor and intensity of the program, required collaboration among nursing faculty to accomplish the integration. The ANC Integrated Spirituality Model was developed and used as an organizing framework. This model integrates the Creighton University College of Nursing selected Ignatian values as the foundation. Specific student activities involving spirituality and reflective practice were identified for each of the three semesters of the ANC to promote leveling of the student learning activities. The establishment of a reflective practice was identified to envelop the organizing framework and provide a critical tangible proficiency for support and evaluation of the integration of spirituality across the ANC curriculum and an ongoing resource for future nursing practice

The Homing of the Word: Textual Intimacy in the Gospel of John

Christian spirituality is rooted in the Gospels. In proclaiming the truth of Resurrection and the presence of the Risen Jesus, each Gospel stories Jesus into human imagining. The Gospel of John is experienced as radically different from the Synoptic texts. Something in it affects everything of it. It seemingly knows Jesus differently, engages a reader differently, Gospels differently, even and actually loves differently. This study considers what the Gospel of John does to a reader. Though not an exegetical study in the strict sense, it depends on a most simple, most beautiful, and most intimate line in all of Scripture: that the Word became flesh and dwells among us. It names Incarnation as the unfinished and evolving mystery that creates, shapes, and energizes the difference of the Fourth Gospel, staking a definitive claim on the whole of the biblical text and intimating the presence of an irrevocable and pursuing passion in God for human being and becoming, for choosing to dwell particularly in and depend on the human person in the evolving and expanding fullness of creation. It considers how Incarnation gives itself as gift to the poiesic textuality of the Gospel so as to do God differently within the bodied experience of each reader. It argues that the raison d’ etre of the Fourth Gospel is experiential intimacy with God through-with-in the person and presence of Jesus. Beginning with an overview of the biblical text as the dwelling place of revelatory presence and divine mystery, it situates intimacy with God as integral to biblical thinking and imagining. In considering the Christian experience, it names the Gospels as Spirit-boldened events of linguistic art that engage and transform a reader through intimacy with Jesus. Drawing from the hermeneutical insights of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, an understanding of textuality and the complexity of language is offered, serving as a bridge into the reality of the difference and the more of the Fourth Gospel. These biblical and linguistic foundations create space for exploring a Johannine dynamic of intimacy centered in the mystery of Incarnation and dependent upon the potent and poiesic fullness of the narrative as Word and word, an intimacy that fleshes living faithfulness through-with-in the real and bodied experiences of a reader encountering the real and bodied Resurrected presence of Jesus in the Gospel

Legal Empowerment and Social Accountability: Complementary Strategies Toward Rights-based Development in Health?

Citizen-based accountability strategies to improve the lives of the poor and marginalized groups are increasingly being used in efforts to improve basic public services. The latest thinking suggests that broader, multi-pronged, multi-level, strategic approaches that may overcome the limitations of narrow, localized successes, hold more promise. This paper examines the challenges and opportunities, in theory and practice, posed by the integration of two such citizen-based accountability strategies—social accountability and legal empowerment. It traces the foundations of each of these approaches to highlight the potential benefits of integration. Consequently it examines whether these benefits have been realized in practice, by drawing upon five cases of organizations pursuing integration of social accountability and legal empowerment for health accountability in Macedonia, Guatemala, Uganda, and India. The cases highlight that while integration offers some promise in advancing the cause of social change, it also poses challenges for organizations in terms of strategies they pursue