Hostility to Hospitality
Spirituality and Professional Socialization within Medicine
Michael J Balboni author Tracy A Balboni author
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:8th Nov '18
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Spiritual sickness troubles American medicine. Through a death-denying culture, medicine has gained enormous power-an influence it maintains by distancing itself from religion, which too often reminds us of our mortality. As a result of this separation of medicine and religion, patients facing serious illness infrequently receive adequate spiritual care, despite the large body of empirical data demonstrating its importance to patient decision-making, quality of life, and medical utilization. This secular-sacred divide also unleashes depersonalizing, social forces through the market, technology, and legal-bureaucratic powers that reduce clinicians to tiny cogs in an unstoppable machine. Hostility to Hospitality is one of the first books of its kind to explore these hostilities threatening medicine and offer a path forward for the partnership of modern medicine and spirituality. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship including empirical studies, interviews, history and sociology, theology, and public policy, the authors argue for structural pluralism as the key to changing hostility to hospitality.
It is a great book and worth engaging with, especially engaging on those parts with which I disagree! For it is only through disagreement and dialogue that we gain further enlightenment on this important topic. * Alan Gijsbers, Christian Journal for Global Health *
An audience of theologians, pastoral care workers and Palliative care physicians would gain some insights from this book. It is a subject that is receiving more attention and a distinction between spirituality and religion is being more widely recognized. * Dr Sue Colen, CPCRE Newsletter *
No matter what your existing stance on the matter is, Hostility to Hospitality reads as an invigorating thought-experiment that may be judged "successful merely if readers are willing to consider the underlying grounds for their values and motives as they inform the practice and institutions of medicine" (129). Readers of all sorts, from healthcare providers and executives to scholars of the humanities, will benefit from the authors's acute analysis of where religion and healthcare stand today, and where we may drive them tomorrow. * Avery Glover, Reading Religion *
If you work in palliative care, this book will emphasise the importance of spiritual care and should be of interest to physicians and nurses as well as chaplains and pastoral care workers. * Roger Woodruff, International association for hospice and palliative care *
ISBN: 9780199325764
Dimensions: 231mm x 155mm x 18mm
Weight: 544g
352 pages