Sacred spaces in public places: religious and spiritual plurality in health care.

Several intriguing developments mark the role and expression of religion and spirituality in society in recent years. In what were deemed secular societies, flows of increased sacralization (variously referred to as 'new', 'alternative', 'emergent' and 'progressive' spiritualities) and resurgent globalizing religions (sometimes with fundamentalist expressions) are resulting in unprecedented plurality. These shifts are occurring in conjunction with increasing ethnic diversity associated with global migration, as well as other axes of difference within contemporary society. Democratic secular nations such as Canada are challenged to achieve social cohesion in the face of growing religious, spiritual and ethnic diversity. These challenges are evident in the high-paced, demanding arena of Health care. Here, religious and spiritual plurality enter in, sometimes resulting in conflict between medical services and patients' beliefs, other times provoking uncertainties on the part of healthcare professionals about what to do with their own religiously or spiritually grounded values and beliefs. In this paper, we present selected findings from a 3-year study that examined the negotiation of religious and spiritual pluralism in Health care. Our focus is on the themes of 'sacred' and 'place', exploring how the sacred - that which is attributed as special and set apart as it pertains to the divine, transcendence, God or higher power - takes form in social and material spaces in hospitals.

An integrative review of the concept of spirituality in the health sciences.

Spirituality is a universal human phenomenon, yet confusion and incomprehension of the concept is ever-present. The purpose of this study was to explore how research on the concept of spirituality has been reported in the health literature in the past decade and develop an ontological and theoretical understanding of spirituality. The examination was based on quantitative and qualitative integrative review approaches, which integrated empirical research on spirituality. The sample included 73 spirituality research articles, which were published in English between January 1990 and September 2000. An electronic data-collection tool was designed for use in this project and formatted using Excel software for transfer of coded data into the NVivo software for the data analysis. The results identified essential elements of spirituality, current use of operational definitions and instruments, conceptual frameworks used in spirituality research, and cultural aspects of spirituality. Historical comparison among decades and barriers in researching spirituality are discussed.

Spiritual caregiving at the juncture of religion, culture, and state.

In response to the increasing social diversity of health-care recipients, nurse scholars have turned their attention to developing theoretical foundations for culturally responsive and spiritually sensitive nursing practice. However, despite the potential overlap between these 2 areas, there has been little exploration of the intersections between culture and spirituality. The authors present the findings of an interpretive descriptive pilot study that examined the contexts of intercultural spiritual caregiving from the perspectives of nurses and chaplains. The findings point to the need for health-care professionals to cultivate an internal space in which to provide spiritual care and to seek spiritual points of connection amidst diverse faith and cultural traditions. The contexts of current practice environments, as well as the social setting of a pluralistic and secular state, shape the dynamics of spiritual caregiving. The findings invite postcolonial, critical analyses of contemporary conceptions of spirituality and spiritual caregiving, and call for a rethinking of the trend towards de-emphasizing creedal religions in the quest for a universal spiritual experience.