Chaplain. Clinical Theologian & Educator. Author.
I am a Baptist minister, ordained by the German Baptist Union (Bund Evangelisch-Freikirchlicher Gemeinden in Deutschland) and endorsed in the United States by the Alliance of Baptists. For most of my professional life, I have worked in healthcare chaplaincy and as a clinical educator in spiritual care. For four years, after finishing a PhD program in Louisville, KY, I pastored a Baptist congregation in Berlin, Germany, which was an important time in my life, not the least because both of our daughters were born during those years. I still understand my calling as that of a pastor, albeit not in a parish context.
I am the director of chaplaincy services at UofL Health, a regional healthcare system with facilities in and around Louisville, KY. I also teach as an ACPE Certified Educator in the Clinical Pastoral Education program at UofL Hospital and as an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, where I am primarily involved in interprofessional education and research and in palliative care education. I very much appreciate the interdisciplinary environment, exchange, and research opportunities of an academic medical center that has offered many opportunities over the years.
In many ways, I have come a long way from home, having received my initial theological training in the 1980s at the German Baptist Theological Seminary in Hamburg, Germany, and at the University of Hamburg. Upon graduation, I pursued graduate studies in pastoral theology and the psychology of religion at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, which then had a renowned program in psychology of religion and was still a hospitable and resourceful space for theological reflection and exploration. That would soon change, and I am ever grateful that Edward Thornton, my dissertation advisor, pushed me gently enough to be able to graduate in good time.
I am passionate about theological reflection in my own professional practice and in our chaplain residency curriculum. However, I don’t work as an academic theologian but am a clinical theologian. I practice and teach theological reflection primarily in response to the human condition as it shows up in the clinical context of a hospital. Much of it has to do with trauma, crisis, and pain. But joy is not entirely absent from the clinic. As I see it, the clinic presents a sacred mess of human experience and encounters with the divine. Tragedy and celebration, despair and hope share space, often only separated by a thin veil. To be present in those situations means to attend with empathy to persons in distress and to participate in God’s ongoing work toward salvation, aiming to restore wholeness in individuals and communities.