Nursing the Spirit: Care, Public Life, and the Dignity of Vulnerable Strangers

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 spiritual...