In the contemporary landscape of mental health care, the focus often shifts to identifying and fixing sets of symptoms, sometimes overlooking the profound relational and spiritual needs of individuals. While modern psychiatry has undoubtedly enhanced the quality of life for many, it frequently falls short of addressing the holistic well-being of those it seeks to serve. Dr. Warren Kinghorn and Dr. Jessica Coblentz invite us to consider the successes and limitations of current mental health practices, highlighting the necessity of a more comprehensive paradigm of healing rooted in Christian tradition and praxis.
Dr. Kinghorn is a psychiatrist whose work centers on the role of religious communities in caring for persons with mental health problems and on ways in which Christians engage practices of modern health care. Jointly appointed within Duke Divinity School and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of Duke University Medical Center, he is co-director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative and is a staff psychiatrist at the Durham VA Medical Center. He has written on the moral and theological dimensions of combat trauma and moral injury, on the moral and political context of psychiatric diagnosis, and on the way that St. Thomas Aquinas’ image of the human as wayfarer might inform contemporary practices of ministry and mental health care.
Jessica Coblentz, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, where her research and teaching focuses on Catholic systematic theology, feminist theologies, and mental health in theological perspective.