Illness and death have always raised profound spiritual concerns. However, today most people experience suffering and treatment in hospitals and other impersonal, bureaucratic facilities whose employees are expected to follow scientific, rationalized norms of behavior. How do professional caregivers-the nurses and other workers who tend to patients-navigate between science and spirituality? Don Grant investigates the subtle ways that nurses at an academic medical center incorporate spirituality into their care work. Based on extensive fieldwork and an in-depth survey on spirituality, this book finds that many nurses see themselves as responsible for not only patients' physical health but also their spiritual well-being. They believe they are able to reconcile science and spirituality through storytelling and claim that they can provide more spiritual care than chaplains. However, nurses rarely talk about religion among themselves because they are concerned that their colleagues are uncomfortable discussing spirituality. Nevertheless, by seeking to honor patients' ultimate worth as human beings, many nurses are able to instantiate spiritual values of care. Grant interweaves his experiences as a hospital volunteer chaplain and a living liver-transplant donor with empirical analyses of nurses' spiritual work. Developing a new understanding of the social significance of religion, Nursing the Spirit recasts the intersection of science and spirituality by centering the perspectives of the people who provide care.

Power plants are essential to achieving the standard of living that modern societies demand and the social and economic infrastructure on which they depend. Yet their indispensability has allowed them to evade responsibility for their vast carbon emissions. Fossil-fueled power plants are the single largest sites of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, making them one of the greatest threats to our planet’s climate. Significant as they are, we lack a comprehensive understanding of the social causes that enable power plant emissions and continue to delay their reduction. Super Polluters offers a groundbreaking global analysis of carbon pollution caused by the generation of electricity, pinpointing who bears the most responsibility for the energy sector’s vast emissions and what can be done about them. The sociologists Don Grant, Andrew Jorgenson, and Wesley Longhofer analyze a novel dataset on the carbon dioxide emissions and structural attributes of thousands of fossil-fueled power plants around the world, identifying which plants discharge the most carbon. They investigate the global, organizational, and political conditions that explain these hyper-emitting facilities’ behavior and call into question the claim that improvements in technical efficiency will always reduce emissions. Grant, Jorgenson, and Longhofer demonstrate which energy and climate policies are most effective at abating power-plant pollution, emphasizing how mobilized citizen activism shapes those outcomes. A comprehensive account of who bears the blame for our warming planet, Super Polluters points to more feasible and effective emission reduction strategies that target the world’s most profligate polluters.

Illness and death have always raised profound spiritual concerns. However, today most people experience suffering and treatment in hospitals and other impersonal, bureaucratic facilities whose employees are expected to follow scientific, rationalized norms of behavior. How do professional caregivers-the nurses and other workers who tend to patients-navigate between science and spirituality? Don Grant investigates the subtle ways that nurses at an academic medical center incorporate spirituality into their care work. Based on extensive fieldwork and an in-depth survey on spirituality, this book finds that many nurses see themselves as responsible for not only patients' physical health but also their spiritual well-being. They believe they are able to reconcile science and spirituality through storytelling and claim that they can provide more spiritual care than chaplains. However, nurses rarely talk about religion among themselves because they are concerned that their colleagues are uncomfortable discussing spirituality. Nevertheless, by seeking to honor patients' ultimate worth as human beings, many nurses are able to instantiate spiritual values of care. Grant interweaves his experiences as a hospital volunteer chaplain and a living liver-transplant donor with empirical analyses of nurses' spiritual work. Developing a new understanding of the social significance of religion, Nursing the Spirit recasts the intersection of science and spirituality by centering the perspectives of the people who provide care.

Power plants are essential to achieving the standard of living that modern societies demand and the social and economic infrastructure on which they depend. Yet their indispensability has allowed them to evade responsibility for their vast carbon emissions. Fossil-fueled power plants are the single largest sites of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, making them one of the greatest threats to our planet’s climate. Significant as they are, we lack a comprehensive understanding of the social causes that enable power plant emissions and continue to delay their reduction. Super Polluters offers a groundbreaking global analysis of carbon pollution caused by the generation of electricity, pinpointing who bears the most responsibility for the energy sector’s vast emissions and what can be done about them. The sociologists Don Grant, Andrew Jorgenson, and Wesley Longhofer analyze a novel dataset on the carbon dioxide emissions and structural attributes of thousands of fossil-fueled power plants around the world, identifying which plants discharge the most carbon. They investigate the global, organizational, and political conditions that explain these hyper-emitting facilities’ behavior and call into question the claim that improvements in technical efficiency will always reduce emissions. Grant, Jorgenson, and Longhofer demonstrate which energy and climate policies are most effective at abating power-plant pollution, emphasizing how mobilized citizen activism shapes those outcomes. A comprehensive account of who bears the blame for our warming planet, Super Polluters points to more feasible and effective emission reduction strategies that target the world’s most profligate polluters.