Accompanying the Bereaved on Their Road to Emmaus
Join us for a Workshop for Professional Enrichment for all those Serving in Spiritual Care Ministries!
Presenter: Beth Hewett PhD
Tuesday, November 11, 2025
9:30am - 2:30 pm Eastern Time
In-person event @
Mercy Medical Center
The Weinberg Center
227 St. Paul Place
Baltimore, MD 21202
Room: Truman Semans Conference Room
Parking information will be provided in registration confirmation email.
3.00 Continuing Education Hours have been granted by the National Association of Catholic Chaplains for participation in this event.
Registration Fee: $35 covers lunch, program, and a copy of Dr. Hewett's book, Grief on the Road to Emmaus: A Monastic Approach to Journeying with the Bereaved.
Registration Deadline: October 24, 2025
Agenda for event - click here to view.
Program Description
In hospitals and other health care settings, chaplains are often the first co-travelers with people suffering loss: traumatic deaths, terminal diagnoses, broken relationships, deaths of colleagues, and other kinds of losses. Patients, loved ones, and staff turn to chaplains not only for timely spiritual and emotional support but also for education about dying, death, and grief and resources for ongoing care. In the midst of these responsibilities and expectations, chaplains feel the impact of patient and coworker deaths, potentially leaving their personal grief to stack up, become compartmentalized, and hidden away. Dr. Hewett's talk will outline the elements of a functional, ethical, and spiritually deep ministry of consolation applicable to chaplains’ work supporting the bereaved; to their personal lives as humans suffering loss; and to their need to educate clinical staff in understanding dying, death, and grief. Benedictine monastic principles (i.e., love, mutuality, hospitality, listening, prayer, humility, action, and community) found in Hewett’s book Grief on the Road to Emmaus: A Monastic Approach to Journeying with the Bereaved (Liturgical Press, 2023), anchor evidence-based and trauma-informed grief support. These principles can enable chaplains to accompany people on their initial steps of bereavement by helping them to:
- remember the basics of their ministry when they’re most stressed,
- develop support that works in both their personal and professional settings, and
- collaborate with and educate clinical personnel to support everyone experiencing the effects of traumatic loss.
Additionally, Dr. Hewett will share how the bereaved can apply these eight Benedictine principles to learn to find themselves again after loss.
Presenter Information
Beth Hewett, Ph.D. began her Benedictine bereavement work as a facilitator trainer for the now-disbanded National Catholic Ministry to the Bereaved (NCMB).
Since 2003, she has founded and led support groups, conducted workshops and seminars for both the bereaved and bereavement facilitators, and coached private clients in both faith and non-faith contexts. Using both her PhD in rhetoric and communications as well as intensive grief studies, she has focused for 22 years on bereavement support for people of various faiths. Dr. Hewett’s credentials include being a Certified Thanatologist (CT) with the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC), a Certified Grief Counselor with the American Academy of Grief Counseling (AAGC), and a Certified Compassionate Bereavement Care™ Provider with the MISS Foundation.
She is a trained Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) provider with the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation (ICISF). She also has earned a certificate in Death and Grief Studies from the Center for Loss and Life Transition. She is trained in trauma-informed grief care, assisting bereaved parents and providing critical incident traumatic grief care for first responders and emergency services professionals. Her scope of coaching practice includes developing rituals and supporting people grieving suicide, accidents, parental decline and caregiving, spousal loss, and life-based challenges like relationship disconnects. In addition to Grief on the Road to Emmaus: A Monastic Approach to Journeying with the Bereaved, Dr. Hewett has written Duty, Honor, Hope: Strategies for Understanding and Unpacking First Responder Grief (ICISF, 2023, 2nd edition forthcoming), Supporting a Grieving Workforce (ICISF, 2021) with Dr. Richard Ottenstein, and the Good Words for Grieving series (Westbow Press, 2013).
Questions, please email Jeanine @ the NACC ([email protected])