| Summary: | Includes bibliographies. === In the circumstances prevailing in contemporary India, and certainly since AIDS, it is hardly possible for Christian Pastors to limit their hospital ministry, especially their ministry to the terminally ill, to members of their own denomination or religion. India is notoriously rich in its variety of religious traditions and, as we will see, there is a universal Indianness which seems to stamp itself upon even the representatives of the Abrahamic faiths present on that Continent. It is therefore vital that the Pastor should be able to enter gently and swiftly into a patient's religious world-view. To do this we need to see if the teeming chaos cannot be reduced to some conceptual categories and ways found to describe those categories and locate individuals within them. For this purpose we employed Cumpsty's General Theory of Religion. The theory establishes three coherent ideal types and sub-types of religious tradition in relation to which all actual traditions can be located. Central to the distinctions between them is that immediate experience can be real and ultimate, not real, or real but not ultimate, that is, reality can be monistic (in corporate or individual style) or dualistic. There are consequences of these, for example, the powers-that-be can be essentially personal or neither clearly personal nor impersonal; time is conceived as circular, rhythmical or linear. Sometimes life events are partially predictable and/or partially controllable or they are not. It is the mixing and matching of these, and similar, possibilities together with the affirmation that experience is chaos (the only overtly non-religious position) which provides a number of theoretical but recognizable profiles within the Indian situation. The crucial stage of the project was that in which these theoretical possibilities had to be operationalized in a set of questions meaningful within the context being investigated. The questionnaire which resulted was used to structure interviews in a pilot study in the Hindu, Muslim and Christian communities of Tamilnadu State, in response to which the questionnaire was accepted, but slightly extended for use in the main survey. The data obtained from both surveys allowed a number of actually existing profiles of different kinds to be identified and described, and also identified those questions which were the most discriminating in the location of respondents within these profiles. The instrument was then used in interviews with a, necessarily smaller, sample of terminally ill patients. The data from this study showed that in general the terminally ill fitted into the profiles identified for the "healthy". It also provided interesting information on the similarities and differences between the "healthy" sample and the terminally ill and (unexpected in its level of distinctiveness) differences between AIDS and cancer patients. The data also enabled the questions to be prioritized for use with terminally ill patients who had been located in a particular profile. Finally, a suggestion for an approach to pastoral care in each profile, based on an understanding of the "logic of belonging" operative in that profile, is offered.
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