Spirituality and Social Work Practice

This course examines the experience and the role of spirituality and religious traditions in clinical social work practice with client systems. The course considers the spiritual and religious contexts shaping assessment and intervention processes in clinical social work services and examines the ways that faith traditions and spiritual experiences shape clients' and professionals' lives, and the points of connection they form with the delivery of clinical social work services. Rather than overviewing specific religious belief systems per se, this course will primarily be attuned to the ways that clients' faith traditions and spiritual experiences shape their healing and suffering. The course examines the resources as well as the dilemmas that clients' spiritual and religious traditions present in our attempts to provide effective clinical social work services, and the means by which spiritual and religious influences can be tapped by social workers to better their clients' lives. As a premise, this class takes the view that spirituality and faith traditions are experienced in a diversity of ways, and thus issues of difference and sensitivity to different expressions and experiences of spirituality and religious practice form a bedrock of considering clinical services to clients.