Publications

Being All the Things

Rand, K. C. (2021). Being All the Things. In N. Bauer-Maglin & V. Breitbart (Eds.), Tick tock: Essays on becoming a parent after 40. Dottir Press.

Beyond Mindfulness: Reflective Practice for Buddhist Caregivers and Clinicians in Formation

(2019, unpublished conference paper)

As Buddhist caregivers, we draw deeply from our spiritual practices in order to provide the most compassionate care. Engaging in caregiving from a Buddhist perspective means taking a relational approach to our practice and our work. Critical to a relationship-centered and intercultural model of care is an awareness and investigation of our own subjectivities and the way that they can either foster or impede connection. What do the qualities of curiosity, humility, and mutuality mean in the context of a clinical, research, or teacher-student relationship—any relationship where there is power asymmetry? Being curious means we want to truly know the other, holding our own assumptions lightly and listening from a not-knowing stance as fully as possible. Being humble means not thinking we are the expert, and it means suspending our judgments in the same way that we meet the mind, gently and lovingly, in meditation practice. Approaching our relationships with mutuality means being willing to be vulnerable when we ask others to be vulnerable with us. It means creating an emotionally safe space for suffering to be shared. All of this requires a vigilant reflective practice on the part of the caregiver, and these skills can be cultivated, much like a meditation practice, in the process of research and writing as much as they can in the actual practice of spiritual care. This paper explores the potential for reflective practice, in research, writing, and pedagogy in the formation and self-supervision of Buddhist clinicians.

Method as Spiritual Care: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Teenage Pregnancy and Abortion

Rand, K. C. (2019). Method As Spiritual Care: An Autoethnographic Exploration of Teenage Pregnancy and Abortion [Claremont School of Theology].

This dissertation looks at how autoethnography can be used as a method for spiritual care pedagogy, research, and practice, by showing the inductive, reflective, and hermeneutical process involved in a narrative and deeply relational approach to research and writing. Understanding spirituality as, in essence, meaning-making, I consider the ways that storytelling and listening act toward the same goal. In exploring my own experience of adolescent abortion, in collaboration with my parents and other women who had abortions as teenagers, I demonstrate how autoethnography can serve to illuminate larger structural issues (the personal truly is political) and be a critical resource for professional formation and self-supervision. For various reasons, including our marginalization in the larger discipline of theology, evidence-based norms within the clinical context, and the subordination of subjects that have been deemed more “feminine,” pastoral theologians have not always brought our greatest strengths as caregivers of the soul (psyche)—commitments to bearing witness, offering compassion, reflecting deeply and ethically—to our research endeavors. Scholar-practitioners who are committed to transformation and social justice and, especially within pastoral theology, to intercultural care, can use personal narrative to explore stigmatized topics in a mutual, relational, integrative, and therapeutic manner. In the dissertation, I provide an example of autoethnographic research and writing as practical theological reflective practice, and as a way of embodying the metaphor of the “living human document within the web.”

Navigating Multiplicity in a Binary World: A Javanese Example of Complex Religious Identity

Rand, K. C. (2019). Navigating multiplicity in a binary world: A Javanese example of complex religious identity. In G. D. Chryssides & S. E. Gregg (Eds.), The insider/outsider debate: New perspectives in the study of religion. Equinox.

Existing, theological interpretations of complex religious identity ‒ that is, spiritual formation influenced by more than one religious tradition ‒ fail to consider fully the positive, integrative, and adaptive dimensions of this expression of spirituality. In this chapter the author presents findings from a qualitative study of Javanese individuals with complex religious identities, which challenge the assumption that people who draw from multiple religious traditions do not have spiritual depth because they take a cafeteria or bricolage approach to spirituality. The participants in this study are spiritually and intellectually independent, deeply committed to their spiritual life, and likely to have mystical conceptions of God. They must find ways to integrate these multiple religious traditions in an environment that, while religiously plural, still enforces singular religious identity. The study focused on two questions: (1) How do people with complex religious identity in Java, Indonesia, understand and explain their spirituality? (2) In what ways do people with complex religious identity respond to and navigate the norms and conventional interpretations of their traditions? These questions were engaged through two months of field research and in-depth interviews in and around the city of Yogyakarta in 2013. The study was informed by hermeneutic phenomenology, critical theory, and by the author’s primary disciplinary lens of pastoral theology, and used a grounded-theory approach to data analysis. Though the research conducted is particular to the Javanese context, the data suggest universal aspects of complex religious identity that deserve further study.