Constructing Meaning through Religious Coping: Rebuilding the Shattered Assumptive World of Bereaved Mothers

Revision with unchanged content. Researchers have begun to examine the theory that religion may help bereaved individuals provide meaning (or an explanation) to an otherwise inconceivable event. Recent work has spawned a growing understanding that bereavement forces individuals to restructure and rebuild previously held assumptions about the self and the world. This book examines the inter-relationship of religious coping, meaning reconstruction, and shattered assumptions by reviewing these three domains. Definitions surrounding “religious coping” and “meaning reconstruction” are clarified, and theoretical constructs are refined by exploring their relationships. This book presents a study which examined mediator-moderator effects of positive and negative religious coping on relationships between grief intensity and world assumptions in mothers bereaved by the death of a child (by homicide, illness, or accident). Results suggest that the negative associations of grief with world assumptions may be, in part, offset when grief is processed through positive religious coping and enhanced when grief is processed through negative religious coping. Suggestions for future research are discussed, including methodological and conceptual considerations. The need to find meaning in the universe is as real as the need for trust and love, for relations with other human beings. Margaret Mead, Twentieth Century Faith (1972)

earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the Univ. of Missouri, St. Louis, with an emphasis on death, dying, and bereavement. She teaches in the Religious Studies Department at Webster Univ. and collaborates with the National Multiple Sclerosis Society (St. Louis Chapter) to work in providing education to MS patients. She has worked with spinal cord injury and chronic pain patients and currently works as a clinical psychologist in Primary Care at the St. Louis Veterans Affairs Medical Center.