Résumé

Religion and spirituality are critical components of inclusive social work. Successful intervention requires being informed about clients’ religious and spiritual worldviews and value systems and how they influence their lives. By understanding these dimensions in a client’s life, appropriate coping behaviors in the context of their lived experiences can be enhanced. It can also be an opportunity for mutual empowerment between practitioners and their clients, as well as in communities where religious, spiritual, and value systems differ. This interactive workshop will explore processes that can support peaceful co-existence based on social engagement through inter-faith dialogue. The aim is to hear diverse experiences of religious and culturally sensitive social work through the narratives of the workshop participants and to propose strategies that could support its practice with different communities. Such an approach could broaden the scope of social work beyond traditional methods, which is especially important as societies become more diverse as a result of circumstances that cause social tensions such as war, global conflicts, and forced migration, among others. The workshop will commence with a presentation of inter-religious dialogue, drawing on principles of Christian, Islamic, and African spirituality as examples. Participants will be given the opportunity to present their experiences, which will be collectively debated to ideally construct a preliminary framework for socially engaged change based on the inclusion of religion and spirituality in social work and social development.

Mots clés (séparés par des virgules)

Religion, spirituality, inter-faith dialogue, culturally sensitive practice