Nursing is a vocation: a calling from God to care for others. The role of the nurse originally grew out of a holistic Christian understanding of humans as created in the image of God. Yet as nursing and healthcare continue to change, the effects have proven disorienting to many. Now more than ever, we need nurses who are committed both to a solid understanding of their profession and to caring well for patients and their families. For over twenty years, Called to Care has served as a unique and essential resource for nurses. In this third edition Judith Allen Shelly and Arlene B. Miller, now joined by coauthor Kimberly H. Fenstermacher, present a definition for nursing based on a historically and theologically grounded vision of the nurse's call: Nursing is a ministry of compassionate and restorative care for the whole person, in response to God's grace, which aims to promote and foster optimum health (shalom) and bring comfort in suffering and death for anyone in need. Focusing on the features of the nursing metaparadigm-person, health, environment, and nursing-they provide a framework for understanding how the Christian faith relates to the many aspects of a nurse's work, from theory to everyday practice. This new edition of Called to Care is thoroughly revised for today's nurses, including updated examples and new content on topics such as cultural competency, palliative care, and the current state of healthcare and nursing education. Each chapter features learning objectives, discussion questions, case studies, and theological reflections from Scripture to help readers engage and apply the content. For educators, students, and practitioners throughout the field of nursing, this classic text continues to provide clarity and wisdom for living out their calling.

Twenty leading experts in the bioethics debate here engage matters of dignity and dying from a Christian perspective. The book begins with essays by David Schiedermayer, Arlene Miller, and Gregory Waybright that root the book in the experience of dying itself. This is followed by contributions from Nigel Cameron, John Dunlop, Marsha Fowler, and Allen Verhey on the topics that provide the guiding vision for approaches to dignity and dying: autonomy, death, suffering, and faithfulness. Four of the most pressing end-of-life challenges-forgoing treatment, medical futility, definition of death, and assisted suicide/euthanasia-are then examined by John Kilner, Christopher Hook, Holly Vautier, and Edmund Pellegrino. The next section, with contributions from Ben Mitchell, Jerome Wernow, Arthur Dyck, and Henk Jochemsen, is devoted to investigations of key settings where people have wrestled with these challenges: Nazi Germany; Oregon; North American legal systems; and the Netherlands. Finally, the book concludes with discussions of five potentially constructive alternatives to the premature ending of life: hospice care (by Martha Twaddle); long-term care (by James Thobaben); wise advocacy (by James Reitman); parish nursing (by Norma Small); and congregational ministry (by Dennis Hollinger).