Interview with Chaplain Matthew Hoffman

Interviewed by Sean Curran, WCIU Special Assistant to the President

Pandemic Theology: Listen, Lament, and Labor: A Theology That Emerged From Those Who Worked on COVID Units is Chaplain Matthew Hoffman’s 2023 book compiling, contextualizing, and reflecting upon his interviews with health care professionals who worked during the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is the culmination of his doctoral studies in spiritual care interventions for healthcare professionals and a meditation on the Christian response during times of global suffering.

(This interview, which took place on December 20, 2023, has been edited for space and clarity.)

Sean: Thank you so much again for taking some time to talk with me. The last time I talked with you face-to-face, you were still working as a local church pastor. I wanted to start by asking you about your journey from being a pastor to becoming a chaplain.

Matthew: It's good to be with you, and I'm delighted to have this conversation. So, I was a local church pastor and church planter for about 20 years. Towards the tail end of those 20 years there was a convergence of several things. While I enjoyed being a local church pastor, I was also facing a sense of vocational burnout. And I had realized that I need to grow in how to care for the sick.

My wife’s health had begun to fail, and all the training I had as a pastor was not helping me care for her. I was in a position where I was doing everything “right,” yet it was inadequate. It caused me to cry out to the Lord and to wonder about what was missing from my training. As pastors, we’re taught a whole lot about preaching and teaching…but not taught equally about being present with people…and the pastoral care that comes through silence and being present with someone who’s suffering. It was something that I didn’t think I could grow in by merely reading books. I was immersed in a situation where my deficiencies were really apparent to me.

Those circumstances led me to connect with some healthcare chaplains that were at our church. They told me, “Come and shadow us.” So, I started to do that. And I realized that there was this whole group of people… whether they may just be in the hospital for two days, or they might be in the hospital for months, or maybe in a long-term care facility for years… they're disconnected from a local church life in many ways. So, something came alive in me: this thought that I could step into these places that are on the margins of church ministry…in many churches I had not seen this sort of ministry to the sick, so I wanted to jump into that gap I was seeing.

And in this journey, the Lord has been shaping my heart in care for the sick and the dying, and in care for staff members that are nurses, doctors…Since that time I've had the real honor to oversee areas of humanitarian aid and medical missions and health missions, areas of global health initiatives. The space I have been working in has remained being a healthcare chaplain, but it’s grown over the last decade.

Sean: Thanks for sharing that journey, which isn’t merely of interest to me as someone who knows you, but I think is really of interest to what we’re doing at William Carey International University. In that journey as you’ve discussed with me and in your book, Pandemic Theology, it’s clear that you have a strong vocational tie between meeting essential human needs as a chaplain and being someone who disciples other chaplains.

Could I ask you to describe what growing into this has been like for you and what it is like to help others grow into it?

Matthew: Well, there are several layers there to address. One layer is that when students are trained in vocational ministry, yes, they are discipled toward particular actions, but what students do flows out of who they are. So who we are, where we are at, those we are shaped and formed with—the context we are immersed in—creates that sense of being and thus what we do.

In the work of chaplains, there’s an educational body called Clinical Pastoral Education. And I really wish—though I learned “on the job” as I did local church ministry in different capacities over 20 years—that I had received Clinical Pastoral Education before I ever stepped in to being a pastor. That Clinical Pastoral Education made it clear to me I didn’t need to be anxious as a minister that I needed to have all the answers.

Within Christianity, we have a common trend of “you’ve got to have the answers.” I understand it’s important to be well-versed in Scripture and to be familiar with several ministry models, so I understand where that trend is coming from. But the reality is, there's things that happen in the messiness of life that you can’t fix…that you don’t have an answer to.

When someone's loved one dies...when a mother's baby dies…and they invite you into that space, that’s not a teaching moment. That's not a time to teach. And in Christian education, a lot of our formation is really geared towards teaching as opposed to...let’s say, the early part in the Book of Job, where Job’s friends sit with him for seven days and nights without saying a word to him because Job’s pain was so great.

If the Book of Job had stopped there, “Job’s friends” would have been the clinic that everybody puts on about how to care for people!

Sean: “If only I had friends like Job’s…”

Matthew: Of course, the rest of that story turned out quite differently because Job’s friends felt this need to fix the problem. They had to figure it out somehow— “Well, you must be suffering because you did something wrong, Job!” And I don’t want to overly villainize them…we can all struggle with trying to find a sense of certainty over things that God himself doesn't speak to.

When you start seeing that, and you live in that… that has a great disciplining effect. It humbles you. It causes you to stop talking and to listen, and to really become a student of those that you are called to “minister to,” but that ministry is to be with them…and to allow them to speak and for them to have a voice in the midst of their pain.

I think that is a huge part of discipleship that is missed in pastoral care. And the Clinical Pastoral Education—which a lot of hospitals have as programs embedded in their chaplain departments—gives training to those who would be ministers in how you are to be with those that suffer. And the approach is not to preach—“Let me tell how you’re supposed to think about this”—as if that approach of knowing all the answers will somehow put a bow on that suffering.

Sean: I think even beyond trends in Christian culture, it seems to me that all-surpassing need to have all the answers—to have certainty—is a trend in American culture. And it would therefore seem to me that just like American pastors, American doctors in their profession would have that same anxiety of needing to seem like they have all the answers.

Matthew: Definitely—nurses, doctors, also. You get into these professions to bring cure…but the reality is that none of us get out of this thing called Life alive. We all will die. And that’s difficult to hold that reality while you step into a space and occupation where you are here to help thwart suffering…to thwart the march of Death toward an individual…which nonetheless is a beautiful, sacred work.

There’s been many times I’ve been with physicians or with nurses where…we couldn’t save someone…and there’s just that sense of ache. You learn so much in school, and you learn so much by the practical clinical work, but then there is also the formation of the individual…the discipleship of the individual through those shaping experiences…a physician, a nurse, a healthcare professional can’t avoid coming to grips with that. And it’s a lot.

So that has been a big part of my own passion, my journey for just under 15 years now--really creating spaces for healthcare professionals to really let their hair down and to really talk about the internal, dark twistings that can happen when you're in this field. For healthcare professionals, their normal workflow is to exist in contexts that are completely abnormal to the rest of society…if you work at a grocery store, your normal work experience is not to see people dying. Tragedy and trauma are experienced by healthcare professionals on a daily basis…and even the norm was significantly amplified for them in the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But I do also want to say that I am thankful for the trends that I am seeing in the training for those in healthcare—for physicians and for healthcare professionals overall—where more and more the curriculum emphasizes the need for self-care. There’s more training for the healthcare professional in how to deal with what they're doing.

And I think in seminaries and other modes of Christian education that emphasis on the need for self-care has also been happening, but…boy, I’d love to see it happen a lot more. Because those in ministry need to grow in a sense of self-awareness: “What’s happening to me?” and “How am I actually showing up in the world to care for people?” “Am I coming into this in health or am I functioning out of my own sense of fatigue or anxiety?”

American Christianity has such a tendency of “I’ve got to get this right,” so if you just proclaim something really loudly and enough people shout back “Amen,” then you can feel better about your anxiety even if you don’t really know what the answer is. But in the midst of that, there are people who are suffering, and they get pushed further to the margins. I have a real passion for the church to center a ministry of care to the sick, the incarcerated, the poor, the hungry…where that is not a peripheral thing that we do after we do everything else really loudly. I wonder what it means when our passion isn’t really for the marginalized.

When I first started in hospital ministry, I met a gentleman on the eve of his 100th birthday. He had been in a local church all his life; he had outlived not only 2 spouses but also 2 children. And he told me, “I haven’t seen anybody from my church in years.”

That sort of neglect may not be intentional. New pastors come in to a church and they don’t know anybody…the business of life clouds our vision…but those that end up being marginalized by the Church I think are at the very center of Christ’s heart. So we need a real reformation—what we might describe as just another ministry in the Church should be at the center of all the Church does.

Sean: I wonder if part of that centering that you’re talking about is how the Church identifies itself. Rather than considering “the poor” or “the sick” to be some sort of outside group, the Church needs to identify itself as the marginalized. So it’s not “Oh, they need help,” it’s “We need help.”

And I think that connects once again to healthcare professionals, too. At the beginning of Pandemic Theology, you discuss that before the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic that there was already an epidemic of burnout among healthcare professionals—exhaustion without abatement, desperation, and even suicide. That the work of healthcare professionals was pushing to the margins the care that they needed.

Matthew: I felt it was important to begin Pandemic Theology by helping people to recognize this long-standing mental health epidemic in our midst.  A friend sent me a copy of Time from the 1980’s where the cover story was that we were at a breaking point in the mental health of those working in healthcare, questioning what to do…so this serious issue is not new.

And part of what adds to the horror of this mental health epidemic is consideration of the history of healthcare institutions in the United States…the vast majority of long-standing healthcare institutions in this country came out of faith-based organizations. They were a substantive way of the Church responding to the call to care for the sick.

But as things have gone forward…the stresses and problems have grown greater…and to be clear, I don’t have answers for those problems…the data is clear that one of the most prevalent causes of death among physicians is suicide. You have people coming into this profession to be healers…and they lose hope. They lose the meaning of their vocation, which turns into a loss of meaning for their very lives, and their calling to heal is reversed into the ultimate act of self-harm.

So it is that context—the context of widespread burnout and desperation of healthcare professionals—that COVID-19 arrives into. And then there’s this additional demand of healthcare professionals…which is a rightful demand of their community and the greater scientific community, to be sure: “You need to fix this!”

So for my book Pandemic Theology, I interviewed healthcare professionals from different contexts throughout the United States, many of whom work directly with COVID patients. Though they expressed some significant differences in opinion on a lot of things, I cannot speak more highly of how they stepped into a sacred, scary space, not knowing how long this work was going to be. We all heard various timelines—22 weeks, a few months—and the end of this is still not clear. So, these physicians, scientists, assistants, custodians, janitors, who all worked on the care of COVID patients and the maintenance of spaces to treat COVID and to work on the vaccines, who live in this intense uncertainty, they are all to be applauded.

I have the utmost respect for all these healthcare professionals, and I wanted it to be clear from the beginning of my book that COVID-19 wasn’t interrupting some sort of fairy-tale tranquility in the field of medical care. A new crisis happened on top of an existing crisis.

Sean: I remember that you make reference in your book to concentration camps during the Holocaust to describe the status of healthcare professionals trying to provide care for others…

Matthew: Yes, I quote from Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. In Frankl’s book there is an observation of prisoners entering the concentration camps, and there were starving prisoners already there who gave away their bread to show care for the newer prisoners.

And the takeaway for those in vocations of care is that there is nothing that quite reveals and formulates your real beliefs than your sense of suffering. Whatever doctrinal statements you may have memorized, whatever you might teach…when you step into a space where there is suffering, it forms a spirituality, a way of being, unlike anything else does.

So those healthcare professionals, like the pieces of bread being handed out at the concentration camps, were handing away pieces of themselves. There was time of isolation away from families, fear in not knowing whether they might bring home the virus and spread it to their families, not knowing if they themselves were going to die, knowing colleagues that died as they stepped into this space of suffering to be healers and to bring care.

Sean: Thank you for that reminder. I think it’s very important that we understand the cost of the care and healing that has been brought into our world in response to COVID-19. It’s corrective to…not just the Church’s, but also the world’s response to the emergence of this pandemic, especially in Western societies, of impatience with the pandemic’s disruption to the status quo.

In addition to that impatience, the response has also been one of sometimes debilitating anxiety…I recall in 2020 especially hearing on the news and in different public addresses this word “unprecedented” being applied to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Your book really pushes back on that notion…you elaborate on several historical examples of pandemics that demonstrate that the responses we’ve seen to COVID-19, just about all of them, do have precedent. You demonstrate that the Church has dealt with pandemics before, responding in varied ways.

So, I would like to talk about those precedents and what they mean for us…and I wonder if the continued emphasis on COVID-19 being so “unprecedented” might be connected in some way to the burnout in healthcare professionals…that their work was made much harder during the pandemic’s emergence than it would have been if precedent were acknowledged.

Matthew: One of the things that is unprecedented for us is that, because of the advances of modern medicine, we don't experience a lot of the things that our ancestors experienced.

But before I get into those historical examples of pandemics, I want to speak to that anxiety response in the last few years…I want to talk about the different voices in the communities of those I interviewed who cared for people during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As I interviewed healthcare professionals throughout the United States that worked with COVID patients, I asked them about their formed spirituality: what theological beliefs or statements they had experienced.

In some cases, they relied upon that spirituality, and it was a very positive thing for them. In other cases, they had experienced religious voices that were not comforting, but caused an increased amount of moral distress, especially when the religious voices were coming from within their own faith community and talking about the pandemic. For those who were caused distress, it was because the voices from their faith community were discussing the pandemic in ways that didn’t fit their daily experience as healthcare professionals.

There were certain voices that were saying, you know, look, you don't need to go to a doctor, you don't need to listen to this. You don't need to go get vaccinated; you don't need to listen to public health professionals…Jesus is your “vaccine” if you believe.

I wanted in this book for the voices of these healthcare professionals to be heard and to capture the spirituality that they saw as helpful or not helpful to what they do. And following that, I wanted to see that spirituality in the light of religious responses to pandemics—dating from early Church history to all the way up through the AIDS pandemic to today. I wanted to look at what Christian voices were saying during times of plagues, epidemics. How were they viewing this type of event? I wanted to compare it to the Church’s response to COVID-19 but also give an opportunity for the Church to step back and learn from voices in the past and from past responses of pastoral care.

What I found was fascinating because…as it is written in the book of Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing new under the Sun.” Which is not to say that each of the historical pandemics I researched did not have certain unique aspects given the particular time period or particular voices involved, but there were very common threads throughout.

For example, our modern society chafes under the inconvenience of intermittent shutdowns of public marketplaces, yet…if you lived for any stretch of 75 years between 1500 and 1720, you would probably spend one-fifth to one-third of your life under plague-related civil ordinances and restrictions implemented in half-year to year-long stretches. Such restrictions are abnormal for our present-day life, but they would have been commonplace for our ancestors in church history.

Now, of course, if you don’t have that context—you go into flight or freeze, which is what we saw happen with COVID-19. If you had researched it, sure, you could see what’s happening, but generally we didn’t have the experience in our own lives of how to process this sort of event.

But let’s talk about some of the specific Christian responses to plagues and pandemics. This is something we can’t talk about without looking at the plague of Cyprian.

Cyprian was an early church father, and he is one of the earliest expressions of a Christian voice during a pandemic. He writes a sermon that becomes influential and also becomes the source of a lot of the data of this particular pandemic. So because of that, this pandemic is referred to as the Plague of Cyprian.

In this sermon, Cyprian’s theme is the hope of Heaven. He’s recognizing what’s happening with this plague, and his way of caring for people is to address the anxiety and panic of the day is by way of a denial and then of a doubt.

Cyprian denies that those who believe in Christ as the son of God have unique protection from the plague because of that belief. There were some moral stigmas being placed on victims of the plague that it was some sort of judgment on them for lack of belief. Cyprian rejects this idea and argues that being in Christ doesn’t mean you don’t experience physical death.

But then Cyprian also says that experiencing fear is antithetical to a life of faith…that it is doubtful that one has faith in Christ in you are afraid of illness or suffering or death.

That echoes in a theme we saw throughout the COVID-19 pandemic: “faith over fear.”  That theme was utilized at times in very positive or affirming ways, like I'm going to believe God, no matter what happens. But there were others that used “faith over fear” to mean that if you were afraid at all of consequences from COVID-19, that was a sign you didn’t have enough faith.

And then there’s our experience of the “fake news” and misinformation being spread during COVID-19’s emergence…there were similar things that Theodore Beza was addressing in his time of the Reformation period. News was being spread about this particular plague: “Oh, this disease really isn’t that big of a deal.” And then some Christian voices got hold of that and added to that fake news: “Oh, this disease isn’t a big deal as long as you believe,” and created some really thoughtless religious rhetoric.

One of the most eye-opening pieces to examine of that Reformation period was Martin Luther's pastoral advice responding to a plague of his time. In these sermons of Luther’s, he was giving counsel towards social distancing. He was addressing the need to listen to healthcare providers and public health officials and talking about the need for personal hygiene, washing your hands.

I mean, you read these, and hundreds of years later we're still having these same discussions. And as you make these comparisons to historical responses of the Church to pandemics, you can really unpack these big concerns that emerged with the Church with COVID-19.

For example, the calling by officials to the Church to close church facilities and cease church gatherings. That was a real cause of concern among many Christian voices during this most recent pandemic, such that those voices put it in categories of persecution. They were using persecution language to express their experience of churches not being able to gather, but you never saw that in the responses of Christian voices throughout church history.

There were historical Christian voices, rather, especially Martin Luther's, where the concern is: “Okay, how do we responsibly care for the sick and make sure that people are cared for religiously and spiritually as they're dying?”

For a relatively more recent example, in the emergence of the Spanish Flu in the 20th century, one of the Church’s greatest responses during that era was to open hospitals. Many of these hospitals that are still in operation to this day in the United States came out of a Christian response to human suffering and a mission to care for the sick.

I’m hopeful that these historical responses that I’ve emphasized in this book will increase theological reflection about these issues…not just of dealing with plagues and pandemics, but of applying action in those contexts toward how we actually care for the sick and recognition of what our real theology is when it comes to that.

One thing that, in my historical research of Christian voices responding to plagues and pandemics, I will say was “unprecedented” was the Church’s response to COVID-19. Unique to this current era was how loudly Christian voices raised concerns about religious freedom…and the need for religious freedom in the face of human suffering…in the face of millions upon millions of people dying…at times hundreds of thousands of sick people dying on a daily basis.

I imagine many people would disagree with that statement, and it’s fine for you to disagree with that and other points of mine in Pandemic Theology. I recognize that there is an ongoing dialogue about these issues, and I have tried to respect differences of opinion. But for me, this is a place of lament.

When I see that previous generations of the Church opened hospitals in response to pandemics, in this current one there was this loud voice coming from different pockets saying about COVID-19 that “This isn’t real. This isn’t true.” And I don’t want to suggest that there was not a lot of beautiful care for the sick that came out of a Christian context in this time, but the loud voice was overwhelmingly loud.

I would ask some of those that I interviewed if they could show me in Scripture where there is a call for an individual to stand on this sense of religious freedom in the face of suffering, and potentially by doing so, to be the cause of further viral spread and further suffering…one of the things that rose to the forefront was that they had real difficulty doing that without quoting the United States Constitution.

I think there really is a mandate, therefore, for Christian education as well as for the Church, to really help people theologically how to think through what the Church is and what the State is, because there was no separation between the two for some.

There is a picture for us drawn in Scripture: Christ leaves the Father’s side, humbling himself to be with us. To be with those suffering, as Emmanuel, “God With Us.” Christ is our means of healing, through his word. Christ lays down his life for our ultimate healing.

I just couldn’t see, between that picture of Christ and between the picture of a Christian response to COVID-19 drawn by some I interviewed, how the dots between those two pictures connected. I was really hoping to receive more explanation than I got, even if I disagreed. That disconnect is unique, definitely “unprecedented.”

Sean: Thank you. I really appreciate your time, and I want to close our interview on that same note about a disconnect between our model in Christ and how we live out our Christianity. For me, the most challenging thing that you argue in Pandemic Theology is that there is precedent in Scripture that God actively listens to our accusations of conspiracies, so that shows a call for us as Christians to go and do likewise.

While I acknowledge your argument as valid, I feel revulsion toward putting it into action. On an ethical level, I struggle with it because I teach college-level composition and research courses, and I feel like my students and I are continually and egregiously assailed by misinformation during the research process, and that misinformation has usually been packaged along with accusations of conspiracy. Sometimes those conspiracy accusations are directed at me as a college instructor. There have been conspiracies against “the real” conspirators that have caused injury and death, especially in the years since COVID-19 emerged.

So…my question is…I can see how God could patiently listen to any number of accusations of conspiracies, however little truth they might contain. But how is it possible for any of us humans to be like God in this way?

Matthew: Full self-disclosure…at the beginning of working on Pandemic Theology, anytime that anybody I interviewed would mention a conspiracy I would think: “Oh my gosh. I don’t want to hear it!”

But this project really did a shaping work on my own heart. When I found myself being dismissive, I was reminded of the subtitle for the book: Listen, Lament, and Labor.  I’m depicting those as the Christian response, not just to the scenario of a pandemic, but to entry into a space of suffering.

This response is clearly, looking at the interviews for the project, what people have been begging for. And you can also see in Church history this protocol: we listen to, and we lament with, and we labor in order to alleviate human suffering…and we do that in community.

And on top of that, as I began going through all of the conspiratorial Psalms in Scripture—“My enemies are after me…they seek to devour me…”—you start reading those, and it is the emoting of someone’s experience. Whether those experiences are true or not, in Scripture we have these songs given to us by God…and these songs are to be sung out within a listening community.

It’s often painful to hear out people expressing a different perspective, but it’s actually healthy, if we’re going to have any sense of civil dialogue and civil discussion. And I think the Church can lead in that, starting by listening together to the conspiratorial Psalms.

That sort of voicing, someone lamenting that they have been the target of deliberate evil, makes me so uncomfortable. But in our community those voices are to be heard. And as I hear the lament, whether I agree with it or not, I must lament with my brother or sister. I must honor them. I must respect them, not dismiss them, and really repent of rejecting them and rejecting their concerns.

There was a time in the United States that the conspiratorial songs of the African-American community, and of the Native American community, and many other communities of color, were rejected by those in the majority population: “I don’t want to hear that. That’s uncomfortable for me.” We needed to listen then. We need to listen now. We need to continue listening to those voices, not dismiss them.

And this gets back to that issue that we addressed earlier—that we don’t need to have all the answers or attempt to give all the answers. Rather, as Christians, our response to human suffering should be to listen and to lament. We should be the students of those who are suffering. We listen to them. We weep with them.

This is not to say that we always believe everything we hear. Part of the value of providing a space for voicing and for listening in community is that it allows what is voiced to be really examined and understood. Personally, there's been times I have said things out loud, and as soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realized that I disagreed with what I just said. That's the healing part of voicing these things out in community.

In community, we are less insulated by our own privilege that often causes us to close our eyes or to put our fingers in our ears. We are part of the chorus, both listening and singing, and whatever the initial discomfort is in joining with that, that community lament will transform us.

But that isn’t to say you’re the only person who has pushed back on that argument, Sean! A couple of my professors who were reviewing my dissertation read that argument and told me something to the effect of “Thank you so much for sharing that, I really do need to listen in the way you are arguing for me to do…but that was horrible for me to process!”

And these arguments and opinions of mine I am sharing are not meant primarily to be challenging but primarily to help. I want to accentuate the need for civil discourse and the need to really listen, because there are times in Church history where many concurring voices have really shut down the community space to differing voices. Thankfully there have been those voices on the margins who persisted. Inoculation, a helpful medical treatment and precursor to vaccination, was opposed by many in its inception. But because of the persistence of differing voices, we benefit today from the medical advances they pioneered.

Thanks for the opportunity to talk about this. I hope Pandemic Theology does a work on the hearts of its readers; it continues to do a work on my own heart as well.

Sean: Thank you again, Matthew, for your time talking with me. Do you have any upcoming events related to the book or to your work that I can draw some additional attention to?

Matthew: Some book signings are on the horizon. I would rather say that if you’re aware of any university or seminary professors that read this interview and would like a copy of the book, you can let me know—I would be happy to give away some copies if that helps to serve folks. I’ve shipped out some boxes of books to universities and seminaries already; I’m wanting to try whatever means available to get it to people. And of course, if you want, it is available for purchase on Amazon.com.

Sean: That’s great, Matthew. I’m sure I will be following up with you after the interview is posted. Thank you once again.

Matthew: Wonderful, please send my blessings to your family. It’s been a joy to speak with you today.

Visit Hoffman's website at:

https://chaplainhoffman.org/about

 Find Hoffman’s book here:

https://www.amazon.com/Pandemic-Theology-Listen-Lament-Emerged/dp/B0CLJW6HT3

Sean Curran

Sean Curran serves as Special Assistant to the President of William Carey International University. Prior to this position, Sean worked for 7 years for WCIU in its property management office. He is also a part-time college writing instructor who has taught at California State University Northridge, Pasadena City College, Citrus College, California State University Los Angeles, and Azusa Pacific University. 

Chaplain Matthew Hoffman

As a healthcare Chaplain, Matthew has 30 years of experience leading at the intersection of issues of faith and ministries to the underserved. He currently serves as the director for the humanitarian aid and medical mission efforts for one of the largest healthcare systems in the state of Texas. Matthew speaks frequently on subjects such as issues of health and spirituality, care for and ministry to the sick and dying, comparative religions in relation to issues of sickness and suffering, work/life balance, compassion fatigue, vocational burnout among healthcare professionals, and humanitarian aid and care for the poor.