So now, what? To help us use the lessons of the recent past to move forward in the future, we sat down with Kirk Bingaman, a professor of pastoral mental health counseling in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education.

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Kirk Bingaman: On the one hand, it seems like everyone lives happily ever after, we’re back to normal. But with this missing year, I think there’s going to be like, reentry time with some hiccups.

Patrick Verel: As summer arrives and the trend lines for vaccinations and COVID deaths in the United States head in opposite directions, it feels like freedom is finally within reach. But let’s face it. The pandemic has taken its toll. We’re not the same people we were 15 months ago. So now what? To help us use the lessons of the recent past to move forward in the future, we sat down with Kirk Bingaman, a professor of pastoral mental health counseling in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education at Fordham. I’m Patrick Verel, and this is Fordham News.

When you think about this summer, what besides joy do you expect to be a prevailing feeling?

KB: We’re social beings, right? We humans are social beings. But we couldn’t be fully social beings the past year or so with the spread of COVID. We did the best we could under the circumstances, but it’s had an impact on all of us, on our psyche, whatever our age, even my own psyche. I wonder, working at home, thanks be to God, I can continue to do what I love to do, but it’s not been the same. So yes, it’s summer, there is joy, there is hope. But it’s a different kind of summer. There’s a mix. With the joy and hope, there’s anxiety, there’s still anxiety. There’s still this cautionary note. And there’s confusion. When will we be on the other side of this? Are we on the other side?

PV: Yeah. Have you heard this term that has been going around? Some people have been calling it the Hot Vax Summer.

KB: I’m not sure.

PV: Yeah, the Hot Vax Summer. And it’s all like, “Wait, really? Are we going to… Oh.” I mean, it’s obviously meant to be this kind of thing. Like, “We’ve been cooped up for so long. Everybody’s just going to cut loose and go wild.” And I just keep thinking, “Ah, I don’t know. Maybe…”

KB: You’re illustrating that’s where we are, in that tension.

PV: Adults and children have had to deal with a lot of mental health challenges during the pandemic, and the end is in sight now. But I would think that those challenges won’t just go away. Can you talk a little bit about that?

KB: The challenges don’t go away, I think for all of us, but particularly those of a young age, who the past year has been a significant developmental time for them. I work with parents who have young children, who were in, whatever, the first grade, the second grade, and then all of a sudden they had to go home. “Go home, we don’t know when you’re going to come back.” “Well, when do I see my friends? When do I see my teacher?” “Don’t know. Don’t know.” So the challenges don’t go away, because that leaves an imprint on the psyche, and we just have to be aware of that. Young children in the formative years are educated in other ways, particularly in the school system, not just the three Rs, reading, math and all of that, but socializing and increasing their social intelligence, their emotional intelligence. So there wasn’t the in-person education, couldn’t take my children to play dates.

So what’s now important, it seems to me, is going to be the reentry back into summer activities and, ultimately, back into in-person schooling in just a couple of months. On the one hand, it seems like everyone lives happily ever after. We’re back to normal. But with this missing year, I think there’s going to be like reentry time with some hiccups. It’s going to be normal for children to have, with the joy and the excitement, a variety of feelings. Some apprehension maybe. They are, after all, leaving the nest, the sheltering at home and back out into the world again. And it’s not just children, it’s adults. I just talked to a neighbor, who, beginning of the week, who’s going back into the city to resume in-person work, but doesn’t feel comfortable getting on the train, let alone the subway, driving in, just that reentry back into the real world.

PV: Your job is to train the folks that help us make sense of crazy things in life, like pandemics. But, of course, they’ve just lived through this, too. What kind of self-care do you tell your students that they should be engaged in right now?

KB: Whatever your education, your level of knowledge, or income, your credentials, we’re in it together, and we have to take really good care of ourselves if we ever hope to be providing effective care for others, which presupposes self-awareness. So I’m self-aware of when I’m feeling depleted, when I’m feeling anxious, when I’m feeling irritable, when I’m ruminating about, “When do we get to the other side,” or catastrophizing. And not only am I aware of that, but I know what to do about that, or where to turn in terms of my own self-care practices. It could be spiritual practices, meditation, contemplative prayer, calming the anxious brain, as I’ve done research on already, physical activity, exercise, and just getting out and into the natural world. A change of pace helps me reorient. It’s restorative. Be about our own therapy, meaningful relationships, whether that’s friends, family, faith community, people that we can be really real and open and honest with. So these are the things that we recommend for those in our care, that we have to be doing for ourselves.

PV: Yeah. I like that idea, that being self-aware. I feel like that’s something that I’ve been, myself, trying to do more of, to actually take note. And, as I think the phrase is, make a mental note of the things that are going on and say, “Oh, wait. I know what’s going on here.”

KB: The popular term these days is mindful.

PV: Mindfulness, right, right.

KB: I’m mindful of what I’m just experiencing right now, whether it be a thought or a feeling.

PV: Three years ago, you wrote a book called Pastoral and Spiritual Care in a Digital Age: The Future Is Now. And it was about how technology was affecting our brains in ways that made spirituality and human connection more difficult. Has the pandemic changed any of your thoughts on any of this?

KB: It hasn’t changed my thinking. It’s only reinforced it, or brought it into sharper focus. While we’ve been sheltering at home, us human beings, digital technology, AI, it hasn’t been. The past year, we’ve had a change of pace. It has not. It has kept evolving full speed ahead. So the human brain was already on overload. That’s what I talk about in the book. Before, to begin with, and certainly before the pandemic, trying to keep up with the tsunami of digital information, trying to parse through all the information that comes our way, more and more, each and every day, information about the pandemic, how it’s impacting our health and wellbeing.

PV: When I think about this past year, the word that keeps coming to mind is exhaustion. What would you do and not do to recharge your batteries, so to speak?

KB: I think it’s important to be patient with one another, even kind and empathic and compassionate with those near and dear friends, family colleagues, and with ourselves. In my own faith tradition, there are Gospel stories of Jesus being into preaching and teaching and with people big time. And then the stories end with, “And then he went away for a while.” And I used to think about that like, “Oh, okay. That’s a rhetorical device for whoever the Gospel writer is.” But no, I think there’s more to it. He went away for a while, like you’re saying, to recharge the battery, to calm the mind for what was coming the next day. So that’s from my own Christian tradition, but there are other traditions. A couple of years ago, trekking in the Himalayas in Tibetan communities, I would hear them, villagers quote the Buddha, an expression attributed to the Buddha, who has also said as much, “Learn to calm the mind. Learn to control the mind, or it will control you.”

“Today’s events are designed for recognition, celebration, and appreciation of the numerous contributors to Fordham’s research accomplishments in the past two years,” said George Hong, Ph.D., chief research officer and associate vice president for academic affairs.

Hong said that Fordham has received about $16 million in faculty grants over the past nine months, which is an increase of 50.3% compared to the same period last year.

“As a research university, Fordham is committed to excellence in the creation of knowledge and is in constant pursuit of new lines of inquiry,” said Joseph McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, said during the virtual celebration. “Our faculty continue to distinguish themselves in this area. Today, today we highlight the truly extraordinary breadth and depth of their work.”

Earning Honors

Ten faculty members, representing two years of winners due to cancellations last year from the COVID-19 pandemic, were recognized with distinguished research awards.

“The distinguished research awards provide us with an opportunity to shine a spotlight on some of our most prolific colleagues, give visibility to the research achievements, and inspire others to follow in their footsteps,” Provost Dennis Jacobs said.

Recipients included Yuko Miki, associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALSI), whose work focuses on Black and indigenous people in Brazil and the wider Atlantic world in the 19th century; David Budescu, Ph.D., Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology, whose work has been on quantifying, judging, and communicating uncertainty; and, in the junior faculty category, Santiago Mejia, Ph.D., assistant professor of law and ethics in the Gabelli School of Business, whose work examines shareholder primacy and Socratic ignorance and its implications to applied ethics. (See below for a full list of recipients).

Diving Deeper

Eleven other faculty members presented in their recently published work in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary studies.

Jews and New York: ‘Virtually Identical’

Images of Jewish people and New York are inextricably tied together, according to Daniel Soyer, Ph.D., professor of history and co-author of Jewish New York: The Remarkable Story of a City and a People (NYU Press, 2017).

“The popular imagination associated Jews with New York—food names like deli and bagels … attitudes and manner, like speed, brusqueness, irony, and sarcasm; with certain industries—the garment industry, banking, or entertainment,” he said. “

Soyer quoted comedian Lenny Bruce, who joked, “the Jewish and New York essences are virtually identical, right?”

Soyer’s book examines the history of Jewish people in New York and their relationship to the city from 1654 to the current day. Other presentations included S. Elizabeth Penry, Ph.D., associate professor of history, on her book The People Are King: The Making of an Indigenous Andean Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019), and Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., professor of pastoral mental health counseling in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, on his book Pastoral and Spiritual Care in a Digital Age: The Future Is Now (Lexington Books, 2018).

Focus on Cities: The Reality Beyond the Politics

Annika Hinze, Ph.D, associate professor of political science and director of the Urban Studies Program, talked about her most recent work on the 10th and 11th editions of City Politics: The Political Economy of Urban America (Routledge, 11th edition forthcoming). She focused on how cities were portrayed by the Trump Administration versus what was happening on the ground.

“The realities of cities are really quite different—we’re not really talking about inner cities anymore,” she said. “Cities are, in many ways, mosaics of rich and poor. And yes, there are stark wealth discrepancies, growing pockets of poverty in cities, but there are also enormous oases of wealth in cities.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hinze’s latest edition will show how urban density did not contribute to the spread of COVID-19, as many people thought, but rather it was overcrowding and concentrated poverty in cities that led to accelerated spread..

Other presentations included Nicholas Tampio, Ph.D., professor of political science, on his book Common Core: National Education Standards and the Threat to Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Margo Jackson, Ph.D., professor and chair of the division of psychological and educational services in the Graduate School of Education on her book Career Development Interventions for Social Justice: Addressing Needs Across the Lifespan in Educational, Community, and Employment Contexts (Rowman and Littlefield, 2019); and Clara Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology on her book America, As Seen on TV: How Television Shapes Immigrant Expectations Around the Globe (NYU Press, 2018).

A Look into Migration

In her book Migration Crises and the Structure of International Cooperation (University of Georgia Press, 2019), Sarah Lockhart, Ph.D. assistant professor of political science, examined how countries often have agreements in place to manage the flow of trade, capital, and communication, but not people. While her work in this book specifically focused on voluntary migration, it also had implications for the impacts on forced migration and the lack of cooperation among nations .

“I actually have really serious concerns about the extent of cooperation … on measures of control, and what that means for the future, when states are better and better at controlling their borders, especially in the developing world,” she said. “And what does that mean for people when there are crises and there needs to be that kind of release valve of movement?”

Other presentations included: Tina Maschi, Ph.D., professor in the Graduate School of Social Service, on her book Forensic Social Work: A Psychosocial Legal Approach to Diverse Criminal Justice Populations and Settings (Springer Publishing Company, 2017), and Tanya Hernández, J.D., professor of law on her book Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination (NYU Press, 2018).

Sharing Reflections

The day’s keynote speakers—Daniel Alexander Jones, professor of theatre and 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, and Tony Award winner Clint Ramos, head of design and production and assistant professor of design—shared personal reflections on how the year’s events have shaped their lives, particularly their performance and creativity.

For Jones, breathing has always been an essential part of his work after one of his earliest teachers “initiated me into the work of aligning my breath to the cyclone of emotions I felt within.” However, seeing another Black man killed recently, he said, left him unable to “take a deep breath this morning without feeling the knot in my stomach at the killing of Daunte Wright by a police officer in Minnesota.”

Jones said the work of theatre teachers and performers is affected by their lived experiences and it’s up to them to share genuine stories for their audience.

“Our concern, as theater educators, encompasses whether or not in our real-time lived experiences, we are able to enact our wholeness as human beings, whether or not we are able to breathe fully and freely as independent beings in community and as citizens in a broad and complex society,” he said.

Ramos said that he feels his ability to be fully free has been constrained by his own desire to be accepted and understood, and that’s in addition to feeling like an outsider since he immigrated here.

“I actually don’t know who I am if I don’t anchor my self-identity with being an outsider,” he said. “There isn’t a day where I am not hyper-conscious of my existence in a space that contains me. And what that container looks like. These thoughts preface every single process that informs my actions and my decisions in this country.”

Interdisciplinary Future

Both keynote speakers said that their work is often interdisciplinary, bringing other fields into theatre education. Jones said he brings history into his teaching when he makes his students study the origins of words and phrases, and that they incorporate biology when they talk about emotions and rushes of feelings, like adrenaline.

That message of interdisciplinary connections summed up the day, according to Jonathan Crystal, vice provost.

“Another important purpose was really to hear what one another is working on and what they’re doing research on,” he said. “And it’s really great to have a place to come listen to colleagues talk about their research and find out that there are these points of overlap, and hopefully, it will result in some interdisciplinary activity over the next year.”

Distinguished Research Award Recipients

Humanities
2020: Kathryn Reklis, Ph.D., associate professor of theology, whose work included a project sponsored by the Henry Luce Foundation on Shaker art, design, and religion.
2021: Yuko Miki, Ph.D., associate professor of history and associate director of Latin American and Latinx Studies (LALSI), whose work is on Black and indigenous people in Brazil and the wider Atlantic world in the 19th century.

Interdisciplinary Studies
2020: Yi Ding, Ph.D., professor of school psychology in the Graduate School of Education, who received a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education for a training program for school psychologists and early childhood special education teachers.
2021: Sophie Mitra, Ph.D., professor of Economics and co-director of the Disability Studies Minor, whose recent work includes documenting and understanding economic insecurity and identifying policies that combat it.

Sciences and Mathematics
2020: Thaier Hayajneh, Ph.D., professor of computer and information sciences and founder director of Fordham Center of Cybersecurity, whose $3 million grant from the National Security Agency will allow Fordham to help Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving Institutions build their own cybersecurity programs.
2021: Joshua Schrier, Ph.D., Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair and professor of chemistry, who highlighted his $7.4 million project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on perovskites.

Social Sciences
2020: Iftekhar Hasan, Ph.D., university professor and E. Gerald Corrigan Chair in International Business and Finance, whose recent work has included the examination of the role of female leadership in mayoral positions and resilience of local societies to crises.
2021: David Budescu, Ph.D., Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology, whose work has been on quantifying, judging, and communicating uncertainty.

Junior Faculty
2020: Asato Ikeda, Ph.D., associate professor of art history, who published The Politics of Painting, Facism, and Japanese Art During WWII.
2021: Santiago Mejia, Ph.D., assistant professor of law and ethics in the Gabelli School of Business, whose work focuses on shareholder primacy and Socratic ignorance and its implications to applied ethics.

“My family wanted to make sure I received higher education, especially as a medical doctor, because no one would look down on me. But I’m now a different doctor—in theology,” said Bang, who will earn her doctor of ministry from Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education this May. 

Bang is a pastor in the United Methodist Church. She was born and raised in South Korea, where she grew up attending church with her family and realized she wanted to “serve the Lord” as a clergy member. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in theology in Seoul. At the time, she decided it would be wise to obtain her Ph.D. in the U.S. and then return home, where she would teach in a seminary school. But she secretly hoped to become a pastor.

“There was a rare chance of being ordained in Korea because I’m a woman and I have polio. Don’t get me wrong—there are many women pastors. But they are more likely invited to be an associate pastor or youth pastor, not a senior pastor. There was definitely gender discrimination there. And on top of that, I didn’t see any disabled pastors at that time [about 30 years ago],” said Bang. 

But when she moved to the U.S. in 1992, she said she realized her dream of becoming a pastor was possible. Bang earned her master of divinity from the Drew Theological School in Madison, New Jersey, and became an ordained minister in 1997. Over the next three decades, she served as a pastor at seven churches across Pennsylvania and New Jersey. 

In those years, she befriended many parishioners who confided in her, including a couple whose son struggled with depression and drug addiction. 

“They trusted me and came to me with many problems. But I really didn’t have a background in pastoral counseling. All I learned from seminary was spiritual formation and a little bit of pastoral care,” Bang said. “Also, there are many Christians silently suffering from depression and other mental illnesses because of stigma.” As a pastor, she wondered, how could she help people spiritually when they are struggling?

Bang found her answer at Fordham. In 2008, she enrolled in GRE’s doctor of ministry program and specialized in pastoral counseling and pastoral care. 

“Fordham helped me to know about myself as a pastor and a person so I can be more compassionate and caring for others,” said Bang.

This past January, Bang defended her dissertation, “Clergy Self-Care for Cross-Racially/Cross-Culturally Appointed Pastors in the United Methodist Church,” which explores self-care for pastors like herself—pastors from a racial or cultural group who are appointed to serve in congregations where the race and culture of most parishioners are different from the pastor’s own background. The goal of these appointments is to create a more inclusive church, but pastors still experience subtle and overt forms of racism from their own parishioners, said Bang. In her thesis, she identifies strategies for self-care for these clergy, including the “broaden-and-build theory” and a detailed itinerary for a three-day retreat. 

“The thesis makes clear that Sunday worship is still, as Dr. King has said famously, ‘the most segregated hour of Christian America.’ Moreover, given the recent surge in racially motivated violence, Dr. Bang’s project could not come at a better time,” said her mentor Kirk A. Bingaman, Ph.D., professor of pastoral mental health counseling at GRE. 

Bang recalled good and bad experiences from American churches, including one of the first places where she served as a pastor: the Doylestown United Methodist Church in Pennsylvania, where the majority of the population is white. 

“On the first Sunday, I was surprised and they were surprised to have a Korean female pastor. I knew they were all white Anglo parishioners, but I was surprised by the size of the church,” Bang said. “Twenty-four years ago, my English wasn’t that great. But they embraced me and were willing to work with me.” 

Today, Bang is the pastor at the Ackermanville United Methodist Church in Bangor, Pennsylvania, where she has served since 2018. Sometimes Bang feels the effects of her childhood polio. Although she no longer suffers from any pain, she still walks with a slight limp in her right leg. But she says her disability hasn’t prevented her from following her calling.

“Being a pastor is a very special vocation,” said Bang, who is now 68 years old. “People invite you to their personal space when they have joy and sorrow, through baptisms, funerals, and weddings. It’s a responsibility, but at the same time, a privilege to be a part of their lives.” 

“[Prayer] builds hope. People feel connected to a loving force in the universe, and that can help them feel hopeful and held when life puts them into difficult circumstances,” said Rebecca Randall, GRE ’14, a licensed mental health counselor in New York City. 

With so many people turning to pastoral counselors for solace during the pandemic, these mental health professionals have had to wrestle with tough questions and adapt to caring for their clients from afar. In phone interviews, Randall and her fellow alumni and faculty from the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education’s pastoral mental health counseling program described the impact of the pandemic on their clients and how COVID-19 has changed the nature of spiritual care. 

‘Where is God in All of This?’

For years, many of Cynthia Wicker Williams’s clients came to her with anxieties concerning their everyday lives. But when the pandemic arrived in March, the reasons for their anxiety changed significantly, Williams said. Many older folks in church communities are now experiencing loneliness and fear of dying alone from COVID-19. Other clients are on the brink of an existential crisis. 

“What’s going on? Is the world falling apart? How am I to live in this chaotic world?” said Williams, GRE ’09, a licensed mental health counselor and pastoral psychotherapist in Connecticut, recanting some of the questions her clients are grappling with. “It’s an existential kind of anxiety that people are presenting right now.”  

Two months later, another bombshell hit the nation: the murder of George Floyd. Williams said her clients became more anxious about race relations in the U.S. How did I not know that people were being treated so badly, they wondered? What do I do now that I know this? And how can I live a more meaningful and moral life? 

“The existential questions people are asking right now are exactly the reason why we need pastoral psychotherapists,” Williams said. “We are trained to lean into the question of, what does it mean? Where is God in all of this? Why is God not fixing this? Why did God let this happen?”

Living with Ambiguity

Williams said she helps her clients find those answers within. She might explore the teachings and holy writings of their religion with them and see if those lead to answers. Sometimes she explores a client’s strengths and what gives meaning to their life. 

Randall, a pastoral counselor at the St. Francis Counseling Center in Manhattan, said that there’s power in prayer, too. 

“An active prayer life can anchor people, give them hope, and connect them to a larger [faith]community,” Randall said. “They feel less alone and isolated, even if they’re praying alone.”

Another way to deal with pandemic-related anxiety at home is to use “contemplative spiritual practices” that calm the stress and anxiety regions of the brain, said Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., associate professor of pastoral mental health counseling and pastoral psychotherapist at the Lutheran Counseling Center in New York. 

Life hasn’t been easy for counselors, either. Bingaman said his students who are pastoral care providers are no longer able to provide care in person to clients with the coronavirus. They can speak over the phone, but it’s not the same. 

“Historically, it’s always been the bedside thing of being there in person, praying for the person. We have the technology to still do that [from afar], but this is such a shift, and I don’t know if it’s going to change anytime soon,” Bingaman said. “We all hope a vaccine comes our way sooner than later, but this is kind of the way of the future, even if we get to the other side of this.” 

‘We’re in the Same World as Our Patients Now’

But people have also shown incredible resilience and adaptability, said Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D., assistant professor of pastoral counseling and a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice. In a matter of days, her clients transitioned to working from home and being with their families in a different light. Cataldo herself figured out how to conduct virtual therapy in both an efficient and ethical manner—how to properly light herself on camera, how to create an environment as safe and comfortable for her clients as her physical office once was. 

When the pandemic is over, our society is going to feel the collective impact of hundreds of thousands of people who have died, said Cataldo. But she’s also inspired by many of her long-term patients who have shown a tremendous amount of growth over the past few months. In the midst of a pandemic, they’re slowly finding their center, she said. 

“In a crisis situation, people’s priorities have shifted. They realize life is short and precarious. So not a lot of time to just spin your wheels about stuff you’ve been struggling with for a long time,” said Cataldo. “That’s inspiring to me. That helps me, because clinicians are struggling too. We’re in the same world as our patients now.” 

“We are to care for the habitat because it is essential to our care for others. To care for our habitat is to care for ourselves,” said the guest speaker, Ryan LaMothe, Ph.D., professor of pastoral care and counseling at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology in St. Meinrad, Indiana. “We can continue to care for people who are suffering from various maladies, psychological and physical, yet we must also keep in mind these larger forces and consider ways to intervene.” 

This year, the annual conference was called “Between Hope and Despair: Caring in the Age of Climate Crisis.” In a series of three hour-long lectures, LaMothe spoke about how climate change could affect pastoral theology and care, identifying challenges for caregivers and offering solutions. 

A Lesson from Mister Rogers

The effects of climate change are more significant than ever, said LaMothe. Over the past three centuries, global carbon dioxide levels have risen from 270 parts per million to well over 400, he said, adding that today’s situation is serious. The rise of greenhouse gases have melted glaciers, increased sea levels, and created catastrophic storms; those who receive the brunt of the damage are the poor and people of color. And people around the world—including his clients—are starting to feel anxious, said LaMothe. 

Our biggest challenges toward making our world green again include global capitalism, which exploits people and natural resources in the pursuit of profit, and nationalism, which keeps us from working toward the common good on a global scale, he said. 

It’s also difficult to change our lives for the Earth’s well-being. We’re all busy—with our careers, with raising kids, and being involved in our local communities, he said. But people, including pastoral caregivers, can still make a difference. 

“In terms of pastoral theology and pastoral care, we need to become more versed in making use of our disciplines as we seek to organize and cooperate with others with the aim of caring for the Earth and its residents,” LaMothe said, to an audience of more than 50 educators, students, spiritual care providers, and clinical practitioners. 

With clients, pastoral caregivers can use spiritual practices to facilitate mindfulness about the environment, he said. He encouraged the audience to view their vocation through a more communal lens—to see the Earth and humanity as a whole. He asked the audience to practice “personal recognition”—recognizing every client for who they are—as most famously shown by Fred Rogers, an American television personality and Presbyterian minister who hosted the preschool television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Lastly, he described the importance of “inoperative care,” in which a caregiver supports a client without following the rules and expectations set by society. He said a good example is a scene in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood where, on a particularly hot day, Mister Rogers invites a black police officer to cool his feet in a plastic pool with him. Despite the racial tensions in their lifetime, the two share a simple, routine conversation—like any two human beings, LaMothe said. 

“Inoperative care meant that Mr. Rogers was not operating out of the dominant cultural representations of the day,” LaMothe said. “Both men, in this moment of mutual care, were not operating under the delusions and contending disciplinary apparatuses of white superiority. They were operating under a mutual personal recognition and care.”

‘The Reality of Working With Human Beings’

In response to LaMothe’s lecture, Mary Beth Werdel, Ph.D., director of the pastoral mental health counseling program at Fordham, spoke about how pastoral caregivers can treat clients experiencing trauma related to climate change or natural disasters. 

Climate change can cause negative psychological effects, including a decreased sense of predictability and control that can lead to acute stress and anxiety, said Werdel. She urged the audience to help clients find meaning in their post-traumatic experiences, especially those related to climate change. 

“Stress and trauma remain intrinsically negative,” Werdel said. “But it’s moving through and enduring the stress and trauma that we come to find and feel and see something different about our world, about ourselves, and about others.” 

She also encouraged the audience to explore psychological and spiritual questions with their clients—not as separate issues, but as one.

“The reality of working with human beings is this: When someone is sitting in front of you … they don’t parcel out, this is my psychological question and this is my spiritual question,” she said, to laughter from the audience. “They just come to you whole. And so we, who spend time thinking about the realities of stress and trauma induced by climate change, have to consider both of these questions together.” 

Towards the end of the conference, LaMothe and Werdel held a panel discussion with two faculty members in the pastoral mental health counseling department: Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., and Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D. 

Bingaman thanked LaMothe for encouraging the audience to neither look away from nor discount the impacts of climate change. Cataldo urged the pastoral caregivers in the room to enter every clinical encounter without memory, understanding, or desire—three things that could impede their work. 

‘The Simple Power of Connection’

An audience member, who identified herself as a hospital chaplain who has supported new amputees and young mothers with traumatic brain injuries, shared a personal story. She said she was a quadriplegic who was once told she would live in a nursing home for the rest of her life. But now, she works as a chaplain who provides emotional and spiritual support. She noted the importance of hope and the place where it is born—“the simple power of connection” with others. 

In the last minutes of the conference, another audience member commented on the positive ways that society is combating climate change, from efforts as wide as New York’s recent ban on single-use plastic bags, to the conference committee’s decision to use paper plates during the breakfast buffet. 

“Any last comments on how we can go forward and encourage our children to be positive and hopeful and do concrete actions to help the environment?” the audience member asked the panelists. 

On a projector screen, Werdel had shared her son’s recent elementary school assignment. He and his classmates were asked to write their wishes for the New Year. “My wish for 2020 is … save white rhinos,” he wrote, beneath a hand-drawn sketch of two rhinos smiling under a sunny sky.  

“I cannot save these rhinos, or the thousand other species that will die because the rhinos die,” Werdel told the woman in the audience. “But I can instill a sense of, hopefully, optimism and agency for what he can do, encourage him to speak out loud his sadness and his loss … Caring about other things—people and places and spaces—that are outside of what he normally sees.”

And while that might seem like a good thing, it’s not, said Jaco J. Hamman, Ph.D., a Vanderbilt University professor of religion, psychology, and culture, who spoke at a Fordham conference on March 8.

Boredom, he said, often leads us to a place of imagination and creativity. But today, it seems, people never have the chance to get that far.

“I don’t think people know what boredom is anymore,” he said. “Because the moment they find themselves in a spot of milliseconds of waiting, out will come the phone.”

Look anywhere, he continued, and you’ll see strangers glued to their phones—in cars stopped at red traffic lights, in elevators packed with strangers. Statistics show similar findings. On average, Americans check their phones 52 times a day, Hamman added.

The technology that surrounds us—smartphones, computers, smart watches, fitness bands, tablets—has become affixed to our everyday lives. It’s changing what it means to be human. But that also means there are negative implications for our spiritual selves.

Today’s relationship between digital technology and spiritual care was the focus of this year’s annual pastoral mental health counseling conference, hosted by the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education on the Lincoln Center campus. Two scholars in the field—Hamman, who is also director of Vanderbilt’s theology and practice program, and Kirk A. Bingaman, Ph.D., associate professor of pastoral counseling at GRE—spoke about how technology has both helped and harmed us, and how practitioners, clergy, and educators can better aid those in their care.

The 21st-Century Double-Edged Sword

Technology taps into the way we’ve been created—as early as infancy, Hamman said.

He brought out a bright green baby spoon: the same spoon he used to feed his two daughters when they were babies. They’d fling it toward the floor, and Hamman would pick it up and place it back in front of them. A second later, the game between parent and child would repeat.

“Sigmund Freud called this the ‘fort-da’ game. It communicates that something that disappears can reappear,” Hamman said. “For Christian theologians, this is important because we believe that Jesus disappeared but will return. Psychologically, it’s a very deep dynamic in all of us.”

“Fast forward to all of us today. Here I have my cell phone. The screen is blank—and I awake my screen 20 times a day. Fort—there it goes. Da—here it is.” Hamman paused. “We play the exact same game that children played a long time ago.”

And while that may be natural, technology has introduced a lot of dilemmas.

In addition to depriving us of our sense of boredom, it changes the way we relate to others. We’re wired to form relationships, Hamman said. The longer we look into the eyes of a stranger, the more positive chemicals our bodies release—neurotransmitters like dopamine and oxytocin, which help us relax and feel like we belong. The same thing happens when we pick up our phones and communicate with the people we care about. But the problem is smartphones don’t help us truly “discover” the other person, he said. They just show them to us.

Technology has delivered other dilemmas, Hamman said. Because algorithms only show us what they think we want to see, we’re not exposed to different ideas and perspectives, particularly when it comes to political news. Our personal data is stored in virtual warehouses and commodified.

Studies have shown that too much screen time lessens our capacity for compassion. And, perhaps worst of all, Hamman said, technology has taken away our sense of boredom—a feeling that often leads to imagination and creativity.

But it’s not all bad, said Bingaman. Technology has touched our lives in positive ways, too.

“Health care and medicine are one of the prime examples of the way artificial intelligence is coming to the aid of human beings,” he explained. We now have psychoeducational apps that aid anxious and depressed clients. Even though social media can increase “FOMO” (the fear of missing out) and anxiety, it also connects us with breaking news worldwide and our loved ones’ lives. And, he added, AI technology has helped his 86-year-old father regain his hearing.

A few years ago, his father received a cochlear implant on Johns Hopkins Hospital. Before the procedure, he had retained only five percent of his hearing, Bingaman said. After the surgery, he and his son took a walk together.

“We walked down one of his favorite places, touring the Gettysburg battlefield,” Bingaman said. “And he stops as we’re walking and says, ‘Oh, what’s that bird?’”

It was a white-throated sparrow—a bird he had not heard in almost 30 years.

Reexploring Our Humanity and Spirituality

But both Bingman and Hamman agreed that we all need to be more mindful about how we use technology—particularly pastoral mental health counselors, clergy, and educators with the people they serve.

Hamman suggested that we focus on developing six human “intelligences” that we already possess: self-intelligence (who we are), relational intelligence (how we relate to other people), transitional intelligence (how we navigate between the divine, culture, and nature), reparative intelligence (how we identify what is in need of care, empathy, and restoration), playground intelligence (how we play vs. how we are being played), and technological intelligence (how technology helps or hinders our self-development). He called the first intelligence the most important.

“My emotions and feelings come home to a body. And it finds home in this body,” Hamman said—not a smartphone.  

Bingaman spoke about the power of contemplative spiritual practices—centering prayers or mindfulness meditation, for example—that can reduce activity in the stress region of the brain and build “attention” muscle that deteriorates from too much screen time. He said these practices can be incorporated in therapy sessions with clients—and it’s important for the practitioners themselves to use them, too.

“Take that sacred pause. Get off the treadmill,” he said. “And if we want to help those in our care do it, we have to be doing it, too.”

More than 50 people—GRE students, faculty, and guests—attended the conference. In an open reflection, audience members shared what they learned from the day-long conference: to be more mindful of how often they use their phones, to understand their patients in a holistic way that includes their relationship with technology, and to try adding meditation or soothing music apps to their pastoral care sessions. Perhaps the most eye-opening one was the realization that technology is inescapable—but to live without it for a while can be freeing.

Bingaman recalled the time his smartphone was stolen during a trip to Nepal. His first reaction was anxiety. Then a German tourist told him, “You realize how free you are right now? You don’t have this compulsion … to know.” And then Bingaman realized something.

“He was right.”

Our phones are flooded with alerts and we are compelled to view them all because we feel “FOMO”—the fear of missing out, says Kirk A. Bingaman, Ph.D., an associate professor at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education. Our ability to give someone our full, undivided attention has therefore declined, he said. But he’s found a solution in a common religious practice—something he calls “contemplative spiritual practices.”

“In religious settings, [it’s] what we’ve always done to bring us closer to God, make us more spiritual,” Bingaman said. “In a digital world, we need to also be doing it to preserve the human attentional capacity.”

The practice is one of the major themes in Bingaman’s new book, “Pastoral and Spiritual Care in a Digital Age: The Future Is Now” (2018). In 143 pages, he details the threats and opportunities that advanced technology—including smartphones and social media—brings, and how the digital age has influenced how we define personhood.

The Power of Prayer and Meditation in the Digital Age

All readers—religious and atheist alike—can learn lessons from his book, especially the parts where Bingaman describes how people can preserve and increase their attentional stability in our hectic digital world, he said.

One way to hone our ability to focus is to regularly conduct contemplative spiritual practices, such as centering prayer—a method of meditation where one focuses on a sacred word or a mantra, like the Bible phrase “Do not be anxious,” and silently prays. Ideally, he added, one should pray this way for 20 minutes a day to achieve the desired effect.

Those who are not religious can turn to mindfulness meditation, he said. Instead of focusing on a religious word or phrase, one should focus on the rhythm of their breathing.

Plenty of people can use these practices in their professions, said Bingaman, including pastoral and spiritual care providers, counselors, clergy, chaplains, educators, and clinical care practitioners working with anxious clients.

As he talks about in the book, studies have shown that these mindfulness-based therapy exercises can change the brain for the better. If you practice them regularly, he explained, they have the power to shape the brain’s neural pathways and help stabilize one’s attention. And in the age of technology and digital distractions, he said, these contemplative-meditational practices are becoming comparably important to religious belief and doctrine.  

Technology of the 21st Century

Bingaman’s book doesn’t focus only on the negative aspects of the digital age; he also gives credit to the ways that technology has made our lives easier.

Many of our daily errands are easily completed, thanks to advanced systems like self-checkout stands at the supermarket, cashless toll lanes at tunnels and bridges, and ATMs at the bank, Bingaman said. He added that medical technology, like cochlear hearing implants, can also have life-changing effects. He mentioned that thanks to those little chips, his father, who suffered from a loss of hearing, could once again hear the songbirds that he loved when he was young.

Bingaman also recalled a meeting with his financial adviser, who, thanks to a computer algorithms program, completed a complex procedure in a matter of minutes.

“My advisor’s brilliant, but he said, ‘I can’t even begin to compare to just the speed,’” Bingaman said, snapping his fingers, “‘and [the program]did it more precisely than I could’ve done it. I would’ve spent hours on it.’”

In his book, Bingaman explores this new hybrid humanity—a mix between natural biology and technology—and the theological implications for religious faith communities.

“What constitutes human personhood in an age of increasing technological enhancement?” he asked. “If we’re more and more technologically enhanced, how will we be a reflection of the divine image in the future?”

But at the rate that machine intelligence is advancing, Bingaman stressed, the most important question isn’t about meditation or even machinery: It’s about who we are and who we want to become.

“How do we hold onto our humanity?” he said. “How do we preserve the most precious qualities of human experience, while we have this window of time and opportunity?”

It turns out that when he counseled his disciples, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself,” Jesus was tapping into a concept that neuroscientists say could reduce stress for our hyperanxious society.

At Fordham, Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, is taking his lead from these neuroscientists and arguing that those who find solace in the sermon would also benefit from what science has to say. In his latest book, The Power of Neuroplasticity for Pastoral and Spiritual Care (Lexington Books, 2014), Bingaman suggests ways pastoral and spiritual caregivers can draw on contemporary neuroscience to help their clients and congregants relieve undue anxiety.

“We hear it in the Sermon on the Mount and we hear it in our churches today—don’t worry about tomorrow, stay centered in today. We grasp it intellectually, but how, practically, do we not worry?” said Bingaman, who is also a pastoral counselor.

Neuroplasticity and the Negativity Bias

In the book, Bingaman explores the impact that an adaptive mechanism known as the negativity bias has on our well-being. An evolutionary cousin of the “fight or flight” phenomenon, this bias describes the brain’s propensity to experience negative events more intensely in order to alert us to potential danger.

A built-in negativity bias was vital when humans lived as hunter-gatherers ever at the ready to flee from a hungry lion. In the modern world, however, this bias tends to cause excessive negativity and anxiety.

“[This] anxiety spills over into our relationships with others and with ourselves,” Bingaman said. “It causes us to assume the worst, to overreact to situations in ways such as, ‘Why did you look at me this way? Why did you use that tone?’”

Fortunately, he says, we are not condemned to primal negativity, thanks to the human brain’s capacity to change across the lifespan. With every new experience—creating a memory, learning new information, or adapting to a new situation—the brain undergoes structural changes, generating new neural pathways and reshaping existing ones. This ability, known as neuroplasticity, forms the crux of Bingaman’s book.

He argues that the most effective way to harness the power of neuroplasticity is through mindfulness meditation and contemplative spiritual practice. Through these therapeutic and spiritual techniques, clients learn to become aware of their thoughts and feelings. Rather than reacting to or trying to eliminate them, clients learn to simply observe them as they come and go, without getting “hooked.”

“Thoughts and feelings have a 90-second shelf-life biochemically. So when we experience an anxious thought or feeling, [the reaction]will dissipate from the blood in 90 seconds—unless we feed the thought or judge ourselves for feeling that way,” he said. “The key to mindfulness-based therapy is to let thoughts and feelings come and go without fighting them. This then reduces the limbic activity in our brains and calms the amygdala.”

These practices—which are so well-regarded that they are central to the “third wave” of classical cognitive behavioral therapy—can take a variety of forms and be applied in both religious and nonreligious settings. For example, one might spend 15 minutes each day sitting quietly and focusing on the ebb and flow of his or her breath. Alternatively, one might practice something like the Christian centering prayer, in which the practitioner meditates on a “sacred word” (such as “Jesus,” “God,” or “love”) while learning to modulate the many other chaotic thoughts that crowd the mind.

A New Approach to Pastoral Counseling

Bingaman says that these practices, informed by the science of neuroplasticity, will “necessitate a paradigm shift” in the way pastoral and spiritual caregivers approach their work with clients, especially clients whose anxiety may have been exacerbated by their own religious beliefs.

“When a theology views the spiritual quest as a matter of warfare—as a battle within the person, or as a matter of good versus evil and flesh versus spirit—that activates neural circuitry that causes stress,” he said. “If we overdo that construct, the person in our care might see himself as flawed and defective, and that could end up reinforcing the negativity bias.

“Whether it’s therapy or theology, we need to look at the frames of reference we are using to help the person in our care to calm their anxious brain. Some of our approaches are going to fire up the limbic region, and others will do the reverse,” he said. “So we have to make more use of contemplative practices in religious and spiritual circles… They’re not just for the mystics off in the desert. They’re for you and me and everyone else.”

If Jesus were a neuroscientist, talk of “plasticity” might have made the final cut of his Sermon on the Mount.
It turns out that when he counseled his disciples, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself,” Jesus was tapping into a concept that neuroscientists say could reduce stress for our hyperanxious society.

At Fordham, Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, is taking his lead from these neuroscientists and arguing that those who find solace in the sermon would also benefit from what science has to say. In his latest book, The Power of Neuroplasticity for Pastoral and Spiritual Care (Lexington Books, 2014), Bingaman suggests ways pastoral and spiritual caregivers can draw on contemporary neuroscience to help their clients and congregants relieve undue anxiety.

“We hear it in the Sermon on the Mount and we hear it in our churches today—don’t worry about tomorrow, stay centered in today. We grasp it intellectually, but how, practically, do we not worry?” said Bingaman, who is also a pastoral counselor.

In the book, Bingaman explores the impact that an adaptive mechanism known as the negativity bias has on our well-being. An evolutionary cousin of the “fight or flight” phenomenon, this bias describes the brain’s propensity to experience negative events more intensely in order to alert us to potential danger.

A built-in negativity bias was vital when humans lived as hunter-gatherers ever at the ready to flee from a hungry lion. In the modern world, however, this bias tends to cause excessive negativity and anxiety.

“[This] anxiety spills over into our relationships with others and with ourselves,” Bingaman said. “It causes us to assume the worst, to overreact to situations in ways such as, ‘Why did you look at me this way? Why did you use that tone?’”

Fortunately, he says, we are not condemned to primal negativity, thanks to the human brain’s capacity to change across the lifespan. With every new experience—creating a memory, learning new information, or adapting to a new situation—the brain undergoes structural changes, generating new neural pathways and reshaping existing ones. This ability, known as neuroplasticity, forms the crux of Bingaman’s book.

He argues that the most effective way to harness the power of neuroplasticity is through mindfulness meditation and contemplative spiritual practice. Through these therapeutic and spiritual techniques, clients learn to become aware of their thoughts and feelings. Rather than reacting to or trying to eliminate them, clients learn to simply observe them as they come and go, without getting “hooked.”

“Thoughts and feelings have a 90-second shelf-life biochemically. So when we experience an anxious thought or feeling, [the reaction]will dissipate from the blood in 90 seconds—unless we feed the thought or judge ourselves for feeling that way,” he said. “The key to mindfulness-based therapy is to let thoughts and feelings come and go without fighting them. This then reduces the limbic activity in our brains and calms the amygdala.”

These practices—which are so well-regarded that they are central to the “third wave” of classical cognitive behavioral therapy—can take a variety of forms and be applied in both religious and nonreligious settings. For example, one might spend 15 minutes each day sitting quietly and focusing on the ebb and flow of his or her breath. Alternatively, one might practice something like the Christian centering prayer, in which the practitioner meditates on a “sacred word” (such as “Jesus,” “God,” or “love”) while learning to modulate the many other chaotic thoughts that crowd the mind.

Bingaman says that these practices, informed by the science of neuroplasticity, will “necessitate a paradigm shift” in the way pastoral and spiritual caregivers approach their work with clients, especially clients whose anxiety may have been exacerbated by their own religious beliefs.

“When a theology views the spiritual quest as a matter of warfare—as a battle within the person, or as a matter of good versus evil and flesh versus spirit—that activates neural circuitry that causes stress,” he said. “If we overdo that construct, the person in our care might see himself as flawed and defective, and that could end up reinforcing the negativity bias.

“Whether it’s therapy or theology, we need to look at the frames of reference we are using to help the person in our care to calm their anxious brain. Some of our approaches are going to fire up the limbic region, and others will do the reverse,” he said. “So we have to make more use of contemplative practices in religious and spiritual circles… They’re not just for the mystics off in the desert. They’re for you and me and everyone else.”

A faculty panel with expertise in pastoral counseling and spiritually informed social work tackled these questions on April 13 at Fordham Westchester.

Spirituality, the transcendent feeling that occurs with a person feels connected to something larger than himself or herself, is first experienced in the gaze between infant and mother, said Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D., assistant professor of pastoral counseling at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (GRE).

“Developmental psychologies talk about the ritual experience between infant and mother as the first experience that actually feels divine to

Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D., says spiritual development begins in infancy. Photo by Janet Sassi

the baby,” said Cataldo, a specialist in psychology and religion. “So the mother is the first God, and what could be more ordinary than that?”

It is, in fact, the ordinary, everyday experiences mediated through the human body—including its psychological makeup—that put people in touch with the spiritual thing larger than themselves, she said.

The panel discussed Descartes’ rationalist idea that reason is based on existing knowledge, independent of any sense experiences. Zulema Suárez, Ph.D., an expert in spiritually informed social work, recounted her inability to find spiritual fulfillment through traditional religions or through the “normal” road to success.  Even though she was working as a successful scholar at the University of Michigan, Suárez said she felt so spiritually void that she “just wanted to hide.”

“I had my spiritual crisis when I was at the height of my career,” said Suárez, an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS). “I felt no integration between who I was and what I did.”

It wasn’t until she began exploring Eastern religions and meditation, she said, that she began to experience “God in everyday things.”

“Until then,” she said, “I felt like I’d only experienced the world through my head.”

Speaking on “Youth and God in the Era of Technology,” panelist Kirk Bingaman, Ph.D., assistant professor of pastoral care and counseling, said that the spiritual development of young people today is inexorably tied to technology.

Bingaman recalled the recent string of suicides by teenagers who have been the victims of cyber-bullying, however, as examples of the “inherent dangers in cyberspace.”

“All of us can be a lot more disinhibited on the Internet,” said Bingaman, who is researching forms of therapy for “new anxiety” that stems from a high-tech society. “You can say whatever you want when someone is not there face to face.

“From a spiritual standpoint, [these incidences]raise the issue of the Great Commandment—that you will love your neighbor as yourself,” he said. “What does that mean, now, in this technological age?”

Conversely, said Bingaman, promise lies in the fact that today’s rapid-fire stream of information makes young people more aware of global events, and more “spiritually minded”—even though they are less traditionally religious.

“They are less interested in the Doctrine of Original Sin and much more interested in what the church is doing about poverty, racism, war, climate change and so on,” he said.

What adult generations can do to help guide young people spirituality, said Bingaman, is to listen to them.

“We should probably do more listening than talking,” he said.

The event, “Journey Inward, Journey Outward: Psychology and Spirituality,” was sponsored by GRE and GSS, and moderated by Dale Lindquist, Ph.D., director of the Beck Institute on Religion and Poverty.