The new Landscape Study of Chaplaincy and Campus Ministry in the United States builds on the National Study of Campus Ministries conducted between 2004 and 2008 by exploring a wider range of groups as it seeks to understand how chaplaincy and campus ministry are meeting the needs of current college students. The Landscape Study (2020-2025) will focus on three main topics: 1) Chaplains and Campus Ministers; 2) Students; and 3) Programs and Organizations. This project is led by Dr. John Schmalzbauer of Missouri State University and funded with a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc. I serve as a co-investigator along with Rebecca Kim, Tricia Bruce, and Katie Hogeman. I am conducting research on Catholic, Jewish, Hindu, and Muslim campus student groups at Georgetown University, George Mason University, and New York University with the help of NYU graduate student Grant Bresner. For more on this project see https://www.missouristate.edu/LSCCM/.
This project fills a critical gap in understanding religious and spiritual support for Medical Aid in Dying. Because almost all religious traditions oppose suicide, the MAiD debate is often framed as religious versus secular when the reality is far more complex. Surveys show 29% of Americans who attend services weekly find MAiD morally acceptable, and 46% of Protestants, 44% of Catholics, and 77% of the unaffiliated agree (Gallup 2024). Yet research on why terminally ill patients desire to hasten their death has largely ignored their religious and spiritual beliefs. Using ethnographic methods, this project explores how religious and spiritual Americans reframe MAiD as ethically defensible and desirable. Rather than simply rejecting religious teachings, personal accounts reveal a process of moral reasoning in dialogue with traditional and nontraditional beliefs about God, purpose, and suffering.
The work of spiritual companions, vigilers, and death doulas is closely related, and these terms are sometimes used interchangeably along with end-of-life doulas, death midwives, and"thanadoulas. In my research on these roles, I use "spiritual companions" as the umbrella category. The companion's role is distinct from that of other healthcare workers and religious ministers, including healthcare chaplains. What exactly companioning looks like varies considerably among organizations and individual practitioners, but many companion training programs frame the work as a spiritual practice. In January of 2013, I began an ethnographic study of companioning programs in hospitals and hospices, which I later expanded to include professional death doulas. Marymount students Jennyfer Fredette ('14) and Elizabeth Jahr ('14) assisted with the first stages of the project as we sought to identify organizations developing companion programs around the country, trace the history of companioning roles, and interview individuals involved in the development of spiritual companioning, including trainers and supervisors of companions. Companioning raises many questions about the relationship between religion and secular healthcare systems and the shift from a focus on religion to spirituality in the healthcare field. I presented findings from this study at the AAR Annual Conference in November 2014. In 2022, I published an article on this research in Omega--The Journal of Death and Dying, which traces the historical development of these forms of caregiving from volunteer programs to professional end-of-life doulas. The pre-publication accepted manuscript is available here. I am currently writing a chapter for End-of-Life Doulas and the Transformation of Deathcare, edited by sociologists Sarah Donley and Amy Dellinger Page.
This project was first conceived by the late Dean Hoge (Catholic University of America). With a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment, co-investigators Tim Clydesdale, Anthony Pogerelc, and I began this project in 2009 by soliciting articles from leading scholars on major issues pertinent to understanding young adults. These articles are available for free download from the CUA archives: The Changing Spirituality of Emerging Adults Project. The second phase of the project focused on intensive ethnographic case studies of churches that are successfully attracting young adults from the Catholic, Mainline Protestant, and Conservative Protestant traditions. Summaries of the case studies are also posted in the CUA archives: The Changing Spirituality of Emerging Adults Project. The last phase of data collection was a national survey of young adults completed in Summer 2013. The co-authored book was published by Oxford in 2019 and received a starred review in Publisher's Weekly: The Twentysomething Soul: Understanding the Religious and Secular Lives of American Young Adults.
Though spiritual care is an integral part of the holistic care hospices provide, the provision of spiritual care is not well-documented or understood. The Joint Commission for Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) requires that hospices assess and provide spiritual care, but it does not mandate how it is provided or by whom. We do not know, for example, how many hospices in the United States employ chaplains (sometimes called spiritual counselors), rely on volunteer chaplains, or a combination of both. We also do not know the educational and training background of the chaplains working for hospices. Individual hospices are free to create their own qualifications for chaplains that may be far below the national standards for board-certified chaplains. Most important of all, we do not have a clear sense of what spiritual care looks like in the day-to-day work of the hospice team. Based on interviews with and observation of hospice team members, patients, and their family members, this ethnographic study will explore the many forms and expressions that spiritual care takes within hospice care.