Unlike Athena, who sprang forth full grown from the head of Zeus, no book comes to life quite so precipitously or unassisted. This book emerged from a small gathering of nursing faculty brought together by a networking grant, written by Barb Pesut, which underwrote the travel that allowed us to meet together. We shared a concern for the direction of the nursing literature toward a spirituality that excluded concerns for religion, even while it tended to utilize quasi-religious measures to evaluate spirituality. Over the course of two years we gathered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and in Loma Linda and Pasadena, California, USA, to collaborate on a series of journal articles and responses to our articles. At the completion of the small grant, we retained an interest in continuing to work together in the domain of religion, ethics, and nursing. This book is the product of that continued collaboration.
Yet, work on religion in nursing remains at the fringes of nursing’s interests. Despite nursing’s claims to whole-person, holistic care, and despite its incorporation into some codes of ethics, religion receives little more than token mention here and there in the nursing literature. It is mentioned as one of many aspects of “coping mechanisms,” it is alluded to when nursing wishes to say that spirituality is not religion, and it receives mention when exceptions to blood transfusions are discussed. At no point does the nursing literature discuss the ways in which religions might view person, health, nursing, society, or environment and how religious faith might condition a patient or a nurse’s perspective on the aims of nursing care. Furthermore, the nursing literature is blind to the millennia of religious ethical discourse on every aspect of human life and community, the thousands of years of wisdom literature that richly addresses the human condition and suffering, and the social impetus found in many religions toward the amelioration of the poverty and misery that give rise to disease. Nursing has ignored and shunned religion to its own detriment.
This work seeks to be a beginning remedy to that neglect. Yet it remained to find a publisher who would risk a book on a taboo topic. Years ago, probably sometime in the 1970s, a friend and nursing colleague was looking, rather desperately, for a publisher. She had a book proposal, a genius proposal, but it was out of the ordinary and no one was interested in even looking the proposal, despite its obvious exceptional quality. Then one day she and I were at a nursing conference, roaming around the exhibits, and we stopped by the Springer booth. There was a charming older woman, wellspoken in English with a German accent. She was alone in the booth—a small booth compared with others. She sat and spoke at great, great length with my friend and told her that Springer would publish her book. We were astounded and asked how this could be. She said that this was exactly the kind of book that Springer looked for. We pressed harder and she said that she was a member of the Springer family and knew what they looked for. What I remember so vividly is Ursula Springer’s response that gave my friend such hope after terrible discouragement and has given me a longstanding fondness for Springer. Over the years, I came to know Springer as a publisher of exceptional quality and prescience. Ursula Springer was subsequently made an honorary fellow of the American Academy of Nursing for her commitment to publishing in nursing. I was, thus, delighted when Springer took on this book and Margaret Zuccarini became our editor. We are greatly indebted to Margaret and Springer for their support of this project and to Ursula Springer for taking Springer so deeply and well into nursing publishing.
There are many persons who have helped us along the way. We are grateful for the labors of our contributors in Australia, Canada, Israel, Jordan, the United Kingdom, and the United States who have made this a multinational endeavor. We owe a debt of gratitude to Verena Tschudin, of London, who generously lent us her wise counsel and enormous talents at review and editing. There are many others, too numerous to name, who have supported this work, tolerated our neglect of relationships, covered our bases while we labored, and provided words of encouragement or impulsion as the occasion demanded. We are grateful for their perseverance and steadfast commitment to us, even if and whenever we muttered and grumbled.
The focus of this book is on religion as a resource for nurses, patients, and the nursing community as it engages in patient care, conceptualizes fundamental nursing concepts, grapples with both the new and enduring issues that confront nursing, and participates in addressing health disparities and the social determinants of illness worldwide. We do not deny that religion, both historically and in the present, can be put to toxic, self-serving, patriarchal, and imperialist and colonialist uses. We do not dismiss the harm that has been done in the name of religion, but to some extent we temporarily set it aside in order to focus on the irenic, life-giving, healing, wise, and just uses of religion. We “acknowledge” that harm while at the same time we acknowledge the heroes of many faiths whose impetus has been to heal and repair the world, respond to human need, and to make it more just.
Over the months that we have been preparing this work, there seems to have been a quiet and as yet tentative expression of interest in religion at nursing conferences, particularly ethics conferences. We hope that this work will further that interest and place it in a broad critical, global, and theoretical footing for nursing education and research. Further, our intent is for this book to serve as a theoretical backdrop for Elizabeth Johnston Taylor’s book Religion: A Clinical Guide for Nurses that is written to assist nurses in direct clinical practice. But nursing’s ethics has never been solely a “bedside” ethics. It has always been, at the same time, a social ethics. In recent years, globalizing forces have brought population ethics, health policy, health politics and diplomacy, and the global politics of religion more acutely into nursing’s awareness. It is our hope that the critical–theoretical aspects of this volume will help to address those globalizing forces as they interact with both nursing and religion.