Salute e salvezza: genealogia della spiritualità nelle pratiche di cura

The article investigates the relationship between spirituality and care by preliminarily reconstruct ing the genealogy of the health and salvation nexus, a link hitherto little explored by sociology. We intend to show that the union between spirituality and care has ancient roots and manifests itself in different expressions that need to be explored within the historical, discursive and practical frameworks that pertain to the link between health and salvation. These three dimensions of anal ysis (history, discourses and practices) favor the sociological understanding of the nexus between spirituality and care, that is, the symbiotic relationship between care for the body and care for the spirit at the basis of the current interest in spirituality within medical and nursing practices. We suggest that to fully understand the current importance of spirituality in the field of health, it is essential to overcome the ahistorical and essentializing conceptualization dominant in the medical nursing literature.