Divinity in nursing: The complexities of adopting a spiritual basis for care
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, the historical alignment of nursing with divinity-based perspectives and modern New Age nursing theories are explored. The nature of divinity in nursing is examined, together with the complexities and issues that arise in adopting a spiritual basis for care. The work of the key theorists in this area (Rogers, Newman, Parse, Watson, Dossey) is reconsidered and fundamental epistemological problems inherent in this approach reviewed. Specific concerns with the interpretation of holistic care, adoption of doxastic logic, faith-based rationales, influence of Caucasian Judeo-Christian and New Age values, misappropriation of science, use of pseudoscience and development of divinity as social consumer product are discussed. Practical problems with using a spiritual basis in contemporary nursing practice are also explored and the alignment of divinity-based nursing theories with the modern antiscience movement is examined. Overall, the re-emergence of divinity-based nursing and spiritual basis for care may be problematic, and would seem to counter the development of an inclusive profession. Additionally, the alignment of nursing with antiscience movements rejecting biomedicine has significant public health implications. This is argued as a regressive step for the advancement of the profession.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.057 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".