Abstract
Spiritual Care as the Foundation for a Child’s Religious Education
Joyce E Bellous*
Corresponding Author: Joyce E Bellous, Taylor Seminary, Canada.
Revised: September 04, 2024; Available Online: September 04, 2024
Citation: Bellous JE. (2024) Spiritual Care as the Foundation for a Child’s Religious Education. J Womens Health Safety Res, 8(S1): 02.
Copyrights: ©2024 Bellous JE. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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This abstract outline spiritual care as the foundation for a child’s religious education. The elements of spiritual care are described by identifying how God concepts form in the young, by naming children’s inherent spiritual needs, by offering perspectives from human spirituality research over the last 60 years, particularly as it applies to children, by analyzing the way meaning forms through experience as it finds its way into worldviews each of us holds by early adolescence, and finally, by depicting four types of literacy (cognitive, emotional, imaginative and social) at the basis of spiritual care and as the groundwork for a child’s future development within various religious traditions. The purpose of spiritual care is to focus on the humanity of children and to situate their education within a framework built on their spiritual needs. This article is deeply embedded in assumptions associated with the Christian tradition. However, a fundamental assumption of spirituality research is that every person is spiritual. As a result, the intention to educate the human spirit as a first step to initiating children into a faith tradition is well founded; it also raises the possibility of spiritual care as undergirding secular education, but that question is beyond this article’s purview. The intention is to spark a conversation among religious traditions as one way to meet the deepest spiritual needs of children, which is an urgent dialogue to engage in at present. If French philosopher Jean Baudrillard was correct, the age we are living in is well described as a revolution of confusion. A response to confusion requires meeting the spiritual needs of children and creating a broad theoretical and practical approach to how they think and act, as they move into a tradition that they take on board, along with their developed capacity to reflect on that tradition from personal and socially informed perspectives.

Keywords: Human spirituality research, Emotional literacy, Secular education, Cognitive literacy, Faith tradition