Nursing the Spirit -

About the Book

Don Grant investigates the subtle ways that nurses at an academic medical center incorporate spirituality into their care work. Developing a new understanding of the social significance of religion, Nursing the Spirit recasts the intersection of science and spirituality by centering the perspectives of the people who provide care.

Book Synopsis

Illness and death have always raised profound spiritual concerns. However, today most people experience suffering and treatment in hospitals and other impersonal, bureaucratic facilities whose employees are expected to follow scientific, rationalized norms of behavior. How do professional caregivers--the nurses and other workers who tend to patients--navigate between science and spirituality?

Don Grant investigates the subtle ways that nurses at an academic medical center incorporate spirituality into their care work. Based on extensive fieldwork and an in-depth survey on spirituality, this book finds that many nurses see themselves as responsible for not only patients' physical health but also their spiritual well-being. They believe they are able to reconcile science and spirituality through storytelling and claim that they can provide more spiritual care than chaplains. However, nurses rarely talk about religion among themselves because they are concerned that their colleagues are uncomfortable discussing spirituality. Nevertheless, by seeking to honor patients' ultimate worth as human beings, many nurses are able to instantiate spiritual values of care.

Grant interweaves his experiences as a hospital volunteer chaplain and a living liver-transplant donor with empirical analyses of nurses' spiritual work. Developing a new understanding of the social significance of religion, Nursing the Spirit recasts the intersection of science and spirituality by centering the perspectives of the people who provide care.

Review Quotes

Sociologists of religion, of medicine, and of work and occupations will find much to admire and stimulate thought.-- "Contemporary Sociology"

Essential reading for health professionals, health systems administrators, health policy makers, and religious leadership. It is an inspiring text that is useful for both undergraduate and graduate courses in the social sciences, the health professions, health administration, health policy, theology, and religious studies.-- "Anthropos"

This book would be useful for scholars interested in work and occupations and the nursing profession.-- "Social Forces"

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 American Religion: Contemporary Trends, second edition

Don Grant brings the reader into the lived interpersonal experience of religion through the care that nurses engender of the body and spirit 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 The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor

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 The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics

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 spirituality, 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 Nursing: The Philosophy and Science of Caring

How can the ideal of being ready to help not only those close to us, and of considering all people spiritual beings, be preserved and translated into social reality? In a brilliant sociological study of nurses in a university hospital, combined with personal and historical reflections, the author confronts us with the challenges for this ideal in the world of modern scientific medicine and opens realistic perspectives that give reason for hope.--Hans Joas, Humboldt University, Berlin, and University of Chicago

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

About the Author

Don Grant is professor of sociology at the University of Colorado, where he is a fellow at the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute and directs the Social Innovation and Care, Health, and Resilience programs. He is also a recently ordained minister in the United Church of Christ who works with communities to design programs that address injustices revealed by the pandemic and climate crisis. Grant is a coauthor of Super Polluters: Tackling the World's Largest Sites of Climate-Disrupting Emissions (Columbia, 2020).