Tiltai

The article deals with the profession of Caritative social worker, its legitimate status in Latvia, as well with historical roots of the profession and its methodology. It is based on the Judeo-Christian anthropological paradigm and is reflected in European guidelines for Social work development, stemming from the founders’ of the European Union concept of the Social stand of man and human dignity as spiritual subject.

The article analyses the most relevant anthropological and transformative tasks of social work supervision in the context of today’s risk society, promoted by the process of globalisation with its instrumental rationality, which devalues the significance of the personality in the social system. The article provides the ontological grounds of the transformative function of supervision based on synergic patristic anthropology, and describes the simultaneous vectors of the transformative function in the supervision process: 1) experiential (experience-based) transformative learning, or acquisition of ‘practical wisdom’; and 2) anthropological transformation as a process of recreation of true self-identity. The article conceptually emphasises the decisive influence of the intrinsic quality of the supervisor’s personality in the performance of the transformative tasks of supervision, as well as the supervisor’s ability to form reciprocity relations with supervisees in the supervision process.

History of professional Caritative Social work content reaches back to the beginning of Christian era. The content and basis of Caritative social work reveals the understanding of social dimension and general conceiving of human beings from the Christian perspective. Solidarity and cooperation, caritative attitude, the value of personality, fraternity made Christianity as principally a social religion. The mediating concepts such as subsidiarity, liberty, solidarity, fraternity and equality can be viewed of unity of human kind in Christ. Article deals with Christian heritage of Europe contributing to commonly shared worldview and reveals the role of Caritative social ministry as ethos of Eastern Orthodox Christianity against the Western subjective individualism. The spirit of egalitarianism is deeply embedded in the body and soul of Eastern Christianity. There is no place for race / social discrimination in Eastern Christianity despite of its highly hierarchical structure. Christians still should stay with their civil tasks and obligations through Caritative Social work since their vision of “the self” is social.