OBJECTIVE Distinguishing the unique contributions and roles of chaplains as members of healthcare teams requires the fundamental step of articulating and critically evaluating conceptual models that guide practice. However, there is a paucity of well-described spiritual assessment models. Even fewer of the extant models prescribe interventions and describe desired outcomes corresponding to spir...

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES To understand how hospital inpatients express their spirituality and to investigate the impact of hospice environment on this expression. RESEARCH APPROACH Qualitative. SETTING Two metropolitan hospice centers in southern Australia. PARTICIPANTS 12 inpatients (7 males, 5 females) who were residents for at least four days. METHODOLOGIC APPROACH Influenced by Heidegger'...

PURPOSE Spirituality encompasses a wide range of meanings between holistic wellbeing and mysticism. We explored advanced cancer patients' spiritual experiences of transcendence. METHODS A total of 251 patients with advanced cancer were included and observed (participant observation) over 12 months by a psycho-oncologist/music-therapist. She recorded and documented patients' spontaneously expr...

Marcuse's Reason and Revolution was the first Hegelian Marxist text to appear in English, the first systematic study of Hegel by a Marxist, and the first work in English to discuss the young Marx seriously. It introduced Hegelian and Marxist concepts such as alienation, subjectivity, negativity, and the Frankfurt School's critique of positivism to a wide audience in the United States. When the ...

Being an essentially multi-disciplinary field, Information Systems does not appear to be informed by a single dominant underlying philosophy. Since IT is an integral part of IS, its philosophical roots are associated with logical positivism. While logical positivism has several merits, its proponents have been unable to respond to criticisms leveled by the Humean Skeptics. Logical empiricism to...

A growing body of research documents the harmful effects of religious or spiritual struggle among patients with a wide variety of diagnoses. We developed a brief screening protocol for use in identifying patients who may be experiencing religious/spiritual struggle, as well as patients who would like a visit from a chaplain. We describe the results of a pilot study in which non-chaplain healthc...

The notion of "spiritual capital" has been the subject of growing interest in recent years; however, the concept remains poorly defined. Based on a review of the academic literature and on interviews and focus groups conducted with leaders and volunteers of over fifteen NGOs and community groups in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, this paper proposes a preliminary conceptual framework for understan...