Spiritual care - with Carlo Leget
Episode 8 of Careful Thinking
The eighth episode of the Careful Thinking podcast features my conversation with Carlo Leget. Carlo is Professor of Care Ethics at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht in the Netherlands and the co-founder, with Mai-Britt Guldin, of the Centre for Grief and Existential Values, which is based in Aarhus, Denmark. Originally trained as a theologian, Carlo has worked in the fields of moral theology, medical ethics, care ethics and spirituality, while his research has been mainly in the field of end-of-life care.
Carlo’s publications in English include Living with God: Thomas Aquinas on the Relation between Life on Earth and ‘Life' after Death, published in 1997, the influential book Art of Living, Art of Dying: Spiritual Care for a Good Death, from 2017, and, with Finn Thorbjørn Hansen and Solveig Botnen Eide, the edited collection Wonder, Silence, and Human Flourishing: Toward a Rehumanization of Health, Education, and Welfare, which was published in 2023. Grief and Existential Awareness: an Integrative Approach, which Carlo is co-authoring with Mai-Britt Guldin, will be published later this year.
My own introduction to Carlo’s work was hearing him speak at a conference on ‘Care Ethics and Precarity’ a few years ago, when I found his focus on the ‘chosen’ precarity of Francis of Assisi and Simone Weil surprising and intriguing. As with the writings of Ruth Groenhout, my guest on Episode 5 of the podcast, I’ve continued to find Carlo’s work at the intersection of care ethics, religion and spirituality personally helpful and inspiring, so I was pleased to have this opportunity to talk to him about his work.
Carlo LegetWe began our conversation by reflecting on Carlo’s personal and intellectual journey from the study of theology, and particularly the ideas of Thomas Aquinas, to his work in the field of care ethics. We also discussed the influence of other thinkers, such as Paul Ricoeur, and also the impact on Carlo of his experience of working with dying patients in nursing homes. Our discussion of care ethics led naturally to a focus on Carlo’s role in setting up the pioneering Masters qualification in care ethics at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht. Turning to Carlo’s writings on end-of-life care, we spent some time discussing his book, ‘Art of Living, Art of Dying’, and the way it adapts the medieval ars moriendi for a contemporary secular and multicultural context.
The focus of Carlo’s work has shifted somewhat recently, with his founding, together with Mai-Britt Guldin, of the Centre for Grief and Existential Values, and we discussed the work of the centre and its development of an interdisciplinary model of grief and loss which takes account of existential and spiritual dimensions. In the final section of the episode, we talked about Carlo’s latest collaboration, the edited collection ‘Wonder, Silence and Human Flourishing’, and about the part played by moments of wonder in the practice and experience of care.
There were a number of resonances between my conversation with Carlo and previous episodes of the podcast. Our discussion of the connections and tensions between religious faith and care ethics recalled my conversations with Ruth Groenhout in Episode 5 and with Maurice Hamington in Episode 6. The ethical complexities of care at the end of life also featured in my conversation with Xavier Symons in Episode 2, and again with Ruth Groenhout in Episode 5.
I confess to being a little surprised to learn that Carlo and Ruth, both of whom mentioned religious faith as being central to their formation, had quite relaxed attitudes to the question of assisted dying, particularly given the consistent opposition of the mainstream Christian churches to the practice. Carlo suggested that ‘the process that starts with the person asking for euthanasia is very important’, that ‘the quality of the process to me is more important than the outcome’ and that he favoured ‘a process-oriented, care ethical answer’ to the question. It would be interesting to hear from a care ethicist who took a different view, and perhaps one of my future guests will do so. In the meantime, I was interested to read this recent article, in The Critic, by the feminist writer Victoria Smith, in which she suggests that the rush to legalise assisted dying could be viewed as a symptom of society’s ‘flight from human dependency’. Some disability rights campaigners, like the English actress Liz Carr, have also expressed concern that a law allowing assisted dying might lead to a devaluing of the lives of disabled people. It’s clearly a difficult and complex debate and one to which I hope Careful Thinking can continue to make a thoughtful contribution.
Here are a few quotations by Carlo from the episode, to give a taste of our conversation:
If I talk about inner space, it's a metaphor...about the ability to be open to different feelings, different thoughts, even conflicting thoughts at the same moment. And I think this openness is also very important when you really want to listen to someone, because sometimes when you're talking to someone, you get a little bit annoyed, or maybe even a little shocked or whatever. And then it is important to distinguish between what you hear and what you feel and being open to develop the conversation in a way that does justice. And this idea, I think I discovered as an antidote to the anxiety and to the pressure in healthcare. And I started talking about it and people recognised it as an important quality that you bring to conversations, but also an important quality to be able to do your work in a good way.
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The more I got into care ethics, the more I got convinced that morality is not something we can put into a system and copy for centuries. But morality is a living reality that we have to find out, listening to the people who are really involved in the issues. And if you look at the anthropology underlying care ethics and anthropology underlying palliative care, you see there's a lot of similarities. For instance, palliative care is four dimensional. It is embodied knowledge, it is relational. People are seen not as individuals, but in community...And I think this has really helped me, having a new access to all these end of life issues and debates.
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We have been trying to make healthcare better, and not only healthcare, but also education and welfare, by planning things, by organising things, by having better methods, by doing all kinds of research. But maybe we should try a different road, and maybe we should try to start with wonder and silence as the starting points of opening up to this dimension that we cannot control. And it is especially these things in life that we cannot control that are often the most meaningful and inspirational.
You can listen to the whole episode here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can download a transcript of the episode here:
The header image is a photograph of Norddalsfjorden, Norway, taken by Carlo, which is featured on the cover of Wonder, Silence, and Human Flourishing.