All Visual, all the Time: Towards a Theory of Visual Practices for Pastoral Theological Reflection.

Visual culture deeply influences those whom pastoral care providers serve, and contemporary practices with images complicate images' contribution to personal or social suffering. I begin by describing the mobile, networked dynamics of contemporary visual practices, which include receiving but also creating, curating, and sharing images in emergent and shifting visual communities. I then utilize visual studies theorist Gary Shapiro's concept of visual regimes, outlining how images work as a kind of soft power that influences the social construction of meaning. I illustrate these practices through a selection of images surrounding the police shooting of Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, and the protests and online debates that arose from that tragic event. I suggest throughout this paper that images play a major part in the social construction of subjective worlds and thus contribute both to our suffering and to the meaning we make from our suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]