Spiritual Ends: Religion and the Heart of Dying in Japan

Join the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab for a conversation with Timothy O. Benedict, author of Spiritual Ends: Religion and the Heart of Dying in Japan and Assistant Professor in the School of Sociology at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan. From the publisher, University of California Press: What role does religion play at the end of life in Japan? Spiritual Ends draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with hospice patients, chaplains, and medical workers to provide an intimate portrayal of how spiritual care is provided to the dying in Japan. Timothy O. Benedict uses both local and cross-cultural perspectives to show how hospice caregivers in Japan are appropriating and reinterpreting global ideas about spirituality and the practice of spiritual care. Benedict relates these findings to a longer story of how Japanese religious groups have pursued vocational roles in medical institutions as a means to demonstrate a so-called “healthy” role in society. By paying attention to how care for the kokoro (heart or mind) is key to the practice of spiritual care, this book enriches conventional understandings of religious identity in Japan while offering a valuable East Asian perspective to global conversations on the ways religion, spirituality, and medicine intersect at death. This book is available as an open access eBook here. We will be joined by: Timothy Benedict is Associate Professor in the School of Sociology at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan. His education includes a PhD in Asian Religions from Princeton University and an MA in Asian Religions from Harvard University. He was also a Foreign Research Fellow at Kyoto University.

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