A view from somewhere: the presence and function of religious commitment in nursing practice.

As western society becomes increasingly pluralistic, nurses are confronted by fundamental controversies, such as those moral, philosophical or religious in nature. One strategy to deal with such pluralism is to dismiss a nurse’s fundamental moral, philosophical or religious commitments as unprofessional bias. In this paper, however, I would like to analyse the presence and function of religious commitment, in particular to see if it could have a justified and relevant function in nursing care. This function will be elicited by interpreting nursing care as a practice and applying a certain theory of theorizing, focusing on the function of ‘control beliefs’, of which professionalism is one particular set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]