Nursing the Spirit

Based on research at a hospital planning to end its chaplaincy program, Nursing the Spirit thoughtfully and sympathetically delves into how nurses think and talk about the spiritual aspects of their work, and how they sometimes provide spiritual care to patients. Both personal and scholarly, this book explores what it might mean for nurses to care for people's entire selves-not just their bodies-and the challenges of doing so. -- Mark Chaves, author of <i>American Religion: Contemporary Trends</i>, second edition Religions urge us to care for suffering strangers. Nursing the Spirit shows that, although hospitals are bureaucratic organizations applying medical science, they are also places where nurses, in an unofficial and low-key way, offer spiritual (as well as physical) care to patients. Grant explains how and why they do this, and grapples with the important question of how an ethic of care can be kept alive in today's societies. -- Paula England, New York University, past President of the American Sociological Association Don Grant raises crucial questions about medical institutions, the place of spirituality in healthcare, and the limits of sociology as a way of knowing. Nursing the Spirit is a fascinating experiment in multifaceted research, as Grant juxtaposes first-person writing-about his experiences as an intern chaplain and as a patient-with social scientific methods of studying nursing work. The experiential and methodological modes of inquiry each tell their own truths, and readers can contemplate how these overlap and diverge. -- Arthur W. Frank, author of <i>The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics</i> Don Grant brings the reader into the lived interpersonal experience of religion through the care that nurses engender of the body and spirt of patients. Out of such professional caregiving, Grant advances the social theory of care as a moral, emotional, and spiritual practice that resists professional and bureaucratic constraints on the meaning and future of the human in our highly technologized, bureaucratized, and neoliberal times. A serious and provocative achievement! -- Arthur Kleinman, author of <i>The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor</i> Don Grant's book on spirituality, and nursing the human spirit is an inspired treatise of sustaining human caring and human dignity wherever it is present! This work honors nursing as an exemplar of spiritually, depth of human spirit, and transcendent yet immanent nature of our shared humanity-evident in small and grand ways. Grant captures the universal history of human care and its relevant to diverse fields and life itself. A tremendous resource for interdisciplinary professional and lay interests, studies and practices. -- Jean Watson, author of <i>Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring</i>