Spiritual Care for Those with Dementia

Join the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab and chaplain Lynn Casteel Harper for a conversation on providing spiritual care for those with dementia and other cognitive diagnoses.

We’ll discuss how spiritual care affirms and supports the essential dignity of those with cognitive diagnoses; how chaplains can communicate with those who cannot reciprocate in the same way; how the mind and the “spirit,” however one conceives of it, interact; and more.
Lynn is also the author of “We may soon be telling a very different kind of story about dementia,” published in The New York Times in June 2025. The article is available here (paywall or accessible via libraries).

Please register here. 

We also want to thank the Dementia Society of America for their support of this webinar. You can learn more about them on this event’s webpage and in the follow-up emails you’ll receive.

Twitter: https://x.com/dementiaorg

Facebook: https://facebook.com/dementiaorg

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/dementiaorg

We have indexed this webinar’s learning outcomes to the following standards and competencies. This should not be construed as endorsement of this event by ACPE, APC, or any other organization:

ACPE Category C Outcome 2 Relational Boundaries, Levels IA and IB
ACPE Category D Outcome 1 Develop Spiritual Care Relationships, Levels IA, IB, and IIA
ACPE Category D Outcome 3 Use of Spiritual Assessments and Care Plans, Level IB
APC ITP 2 Provide Spiritual Care that incorporates a working knowledge of an academic
discipline that is not explicitly religious / spiritual.
APC ITP 3 Incorporate the spiritual and emotional dimensions of human development into one’s practice of care.
APC PPS 10 Make and use spiritual assessments to inform chaplain interventions and
contribute to interdisciplinary plans of care.

Lynn Casteel Harper is an essayist, minister, and chaplain. Her debut book, On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear (Catapult, 2020), was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection for 2021. On Vanishing appeared on the Gold Foundation’s 2021 Reading List for Compassionate Clinicians.

Lynn’s essays and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Kenyon Review Online, Salon, The Paris Review, North American Review, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR’s Think, The Sun Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant recipient and the winner of the 2017 Orison Anthology Award in Nonfiction.
A graduate of Wake Forest University Divinity School and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital’s chaplain residency program, Lynn has served as the Minister of Older Adults at The Riverside Church in the City of New York and as a nursing home chaplain. An ordained Baptist minister (Alliance of Baptists), Lynn lives and writes in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where she is the pastor of Olivet Congregational Church UCC.