Transforming Care by
Nursing involves skill, judgment, compassion, and respect for human life whether or not the nurse is a Christian. Is there anything distinctive, then, about Christian nurses? The authors of Transforming Care address the question of how Christian faith molds nursing practice. Suggesting that such faith entails something more essential than evangelism or a certain position on moral dilemmas, they deal with the ordinary, everyday nature of nursing practice. The first part of the book articulates the relationship between Christian faith and nursing practice while analyzing the concepts of nursing, person, environment, and health common to nursing literature. The second part describes and evaluates nursing practice in three different health care contexts: acute care settings, mental health facilities, and community care contexts. Sidebars throughout the book offer thought-provoking quotations from well-known authors and nursing experts. Contributors: Cheryl Brandsen Bart Cusveller Mary Molewyk Doornbos Mary Flikkema Ruth E. Groenhout Arlene Hoogewerf Kendra G. Hotz Clarence Joldersma Barbara Timmermans
On Moral Medicine by
In print for more than two decades, On Moral Medicine remains the definitive anthology for Christian theological reflection on medical ethics. This third edition updates and expands the earlier awardwinning volumes, providing classrooms and individuals alike with one of the finest available resources for ethics-engaged modern medicine.
The Healing Gods by
Complementary and alternative medicine, or CAM, has become mainstream. The question people typically ask about CAM is whether it works. However, an issue of equal or, perhaps, greater significance is why it is supposed to work. Answering this question reveals how CAM may change not only yourhealth, but also your religion. This book explains how and why CAM entered the American biomedical mainstream and won cultural acceptance, even among evangelical and other theologically conservative Christians despite its roots in non-Christian religions and the lack of scientific evidence of itsefficacy and safety.Many CAM providers make religious or spiritual assumptions about why CAM works: assumptions informed by religious traditions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism forged in Asia, or metaphysical spirituality developed in Europe and North America. Before the 1960s, most of the practices consideredin this book - yoga, chiropractic, acupuncture, Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, meditation, martial arts, homeopathy, and anti-cancer diets - if encountered at all-were generally dismissed as medically and religiously questionable. What causes practices once classified as illegitimate for medical andreligious reasons to be redefined as legitimate routes to physical and spiritual wellness? Promoters of holistic healthcare, or integrative medicine, strategically marketed products to consumers poised to embrace effective, spiritually wholesome therapies.Once-suspect health practices gained approval as they were re-categorized as non-religious (though generically spiritual) healthcare, fitness, or scientific techniques, rather than as religious rituals. Although CAM claims are similar to religious claims, CAM gained cultural legitimacy becausepeople interpret it as science instead of religion. Healthcare consumers, providers, policymakers, and courts need to know not just whether CAM works, but also why it should work. Holistic healthcare raises ethical and legal questions of informed consent, consumer protection, and religiousestablishment at the heart of biomedical ethics, tort law, and constitutional law. Answering this question gets to the heart of values such as personal autonomy, self-determination, religious equality, and religious voluntarism.
Called to Care by
Nursing keeps changing.The role of the nurse grew out of a Christian understanding of the human person as created in the image of God, and viewed the body as a living unity and the "temple of the Holy Spirit" (1 Cor 6:19). Contemporary nursing, however, is increasingly characterized by a diminished understanding of personhood. The impact on patient care has proven confusing and discouraging to many nurses.In the newly revised and expanded Called to Care: A Christian Worldview for Nursing, Judith Allen Shelly and Arlene B. Miller define nursing for today based on a historically and theologically grounded understanding of the nurse's call:Nursing is a ministry of compassionate care for the whole person, in response to God's grace toward a sinful world, which aims to foster optimum health (shalom) and bring comfort in suffering and death for anyone in need.Called to Care asserts that nursing is a vocation, giving nurses a framework for understanding their mission and living out their calling: service to God through caring for others.
Health Care Ethics by
In their thought-provoking and insightful revised introductory ethics text, authors Michael Panicola, David Belde, John Slosar, and Mark Repenshek address complex and controversial health care issues that are very much a part of our everyday lives. Using a normative framework, the authors incorporate specific issues, case studies, and multimedia aides in each chapter to encourage students to engage in moral discourse and reflection. The authors' stimulating faith-based discussion of how particular circumstances in society have an impact on ethical decision making is a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex relationship between health care issues and ethics. Linking new material, including chapters on the patient-physician relationship, regenerative medicine, the pharmaceutical/device industry, and health care reform, to classic chapters on reproductive technology, abortion and maternal-fetal care, stem cell research, genomic technologies, and end-of-life care, the authors underscore the important real-life concerns and issues that confront people in their daily living and the need to discern these concerns and issues with the goal of attaining human and social flourishing. Key additions to the revised text include a glossary; updated facts, figures, tables, and statistics; new case studies; chapter discussion questions, including social-ethics questions; and social analysis.
Should We Live Forever? by
In Should We Live Forever? Christian ethicist Gilbert Meilaender puzzles over the implications of the medical advances that have lengthened the human life span, wrestling with what this quest for living longer means for our conception of living well and completely. As he points out in his introduction, "That we often desire, even greedily desire, longer life is clear; whether what we desire is truly desirable is harder to say." The six chapters of this book take multiple perspectives on issues surrounding aging and invite readers to consider whether "indefinitely more life" is something worth pursuing and, if humans are created for life with God, whether longer life will truly satisfy our underlying hunger.
