Institutional, Nurses’ and Patients’ Spiritual Imaginaries Compared: Sociological Notes from the Field

In this article we seek to compare institutional, professional (largely nurses’) and patients’ perspectives on spirituality with the aim of contributing to two different, albeit potentially overlapping, strands of research, namely, the study of the governance of religious diversity and the inclusion of spiritual interventions in hospital settings, using data collected in the research project RESPIRO (breath) (2019–2022). Importantly, in this article we rely on the toolkit of the sociological trade to explore what we can learn about religion and spirituality by studying hospitals, building on the working hypothesis that the practical and discursive universe of ‘health’ and ‘salvation’, the two most valued symbolic resources of the medical and the religious/spiritual fields respectively, are inherently interrelated. In so doing, we reconstruct the “spiritual imaginaries” surrounding institutional, nurses’ and patients’ perspectives on spirituality in hospital, a previously unexplored sub...