Everyday Religion in Hospitals

Excerpt

Formal or institutional perspectives on religion and informal dimensions of religion are located in the different types of people working in and entering hospitals. Formal dimensions of religion in the hospital have institutional sanction, are more visible, and easily identified. Examples may include organizational mission statements, organizational ownership by an overseeing religious denomination, institutionally sponsored community outreach events to religious communities, salaried employees, especially hospital chaplains and per diem paid clergy, community volunteers overseen by a hospital chaplaincy department, religious artifacts and symbols displayed in halls and patient rooms (especially in religiously-affiliated hospitals), and architectural spaces such as chapels and meditative spaces. While these institutional examples of religion and medicine are somewhat easier to identify, they have been seldom studied. Wendy Cadge’s Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine (2013) is an important sociological contribution that primarily focuses its research around hospital chaplaincy. She provides a vivid ethnographic picture of hospital chaplaincy operating primarily in two academic medical hospitals. While a single book cannot capture all the ways that religion operates on an institutional level, Paging God is an essential first-step in gauging “how religion and spirituality are present in formally secular hospitals” (p.3). …