Institutional, Nurses’ and Patients’ Spiritual Imaginaries Compared

Abstract

In this article we seek to compare institutional, professional (largely nurses’) and patients’ perspectives on spirituality with the aim of contributing to two different, albeit potentially overlapping, strands of research, namely, the study of the governance of religious diversity and the inclusion of spiritual interventions in hospital settings, using data collected in the research project RESPIRO (breath) (2019–2022). Importantly, in this article we rely on the toolkit of the sociological trade to explore what we can learn about religion and spirituality by studying hospitals, building on the working hypothesis that the practical and discursive universe of ‘health’ and ‘salvation’, the two most valued symbolic resources of the medical and the religious/spiritual fields respectively, are inherently interrelated. In so doing, we reconstruct the “spiritual imaginaries” surrounding institutional, nurses’ and patients’ perspectives on spirituality in hospital, a previously unexplored subject. These three spiritual imaginaries are the expression of hospital management’s, nurses’ and patients’ respective positioning in the broader field of religion and spirituality in healthcare; that is, they voice different instances of what is considered the legitimate representation of religion and spirituality within healthcare institutions and care practices.