The Power To Care

This much needed book provides an in-depth and comprehensive look at both the helpful and problematic aspects of social work with overwhelmed clients - those who live in transgenerational poverty and often have a history of little or no employment, family violence, substance abuse, truancy, and teenage pregnancy. What approaches, if any, make a difference in the lives of these struggling patients? To answer this question, the authors follow fifty cases in each of five agencies. They examine each client's problems, the intervention approaches used by clinicians, and the outcomes of these treatments, both positive and negative. The authors also examine the environment in which the clients live and its effect on their behavior. In addition to evaluating the resources and constraints inherent in various agencies, the authors also examine the seemingly dysfunctional national policies and programs which, although they are set up to address and correct the problem of overwhelming poverty, too often merely reinforce these detrimental conditions. Special attention is also given to the roles that welfare programs, coping skills, self-esteem, authority, discrimination, power and powerlessness, ethnicity, and race play in the effectiveness of social work for these clients. The authors include a rich variety of examples and cases that illustrate which clinical strategies used by individual social workers are most effective with overwhelmed clients. The Power to Care will be invaluable reading for educators, clinicians, agency directors, and policymakers who are currently reassessing programs geared to helping this population.

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.

"The Power to Curse or Bless Others" is the second book in a continuing series on Christian conduct by William Derrick Moore. This book provides insight into the very nature of evil, demonic beings, and our own contributions to what we have come to know as evil. It also takes a look at arealm of evil that many Christians fail to see or acknowledge. Once an understanding is reached on all the sources that can influence what we percceive as demonic activity or evil, we have an opportunity to change our role in the process of being a curse or a blessing to others. An important variable in understanding the problem of evil is the rejection of one of God's greatest commandments, love. In rejecting this commandment, it changes the potential and capacity to extrodinarily bless someone into the potential and capacity to extrodinarily curse someone. A central theme in this book is God's gift of free will and volition to his creations both human and angelic. God has given us all the power to bless or curse others. Misusing this gift and power from God constitutes evil. "The Power to Curse or Bless Others" takes a deeper look into the major causes of evil and it also provides insight and understanding of God's true role in allowing evil to continue in the world.

What happens when men and women feel powerful in intimate relationships? When does power corrupt and when does it lead to positive consequences, such as increased sensitivity to others' needs, personal growth, and social responsibility? This book offers anyone interested in such questions a clear and accessible depiction of the effects of social power, based on cutting-edge theory and research. The book starts with a general discussion on the ways power influences individuals. The role of one's personality, goals, and culture seem to play a decisive role in whether power leads to benevolent or malevolent consequences. Some effects of power are more intuitively understood (e.g., taking from or contributing to a common resource, or aggressive responses in parents who feel powerless), while other effects regard much more surprising phenomena (e.g., self-fulfilling prophecies, stopping an annoying fan, or forgiveness for a transgression). Following the description of this social-psychological mechanism, The Power to Care discusses the cultural and developmental circumstances in which power is experienced. Culturally acquired gender-roles, experiencing racism, egoistic vs. altruistic motivations, and defensive tendencies - all influence what men and women want in intimate relationships, and the way power can motivate them to attain their goals. These circumstances may explain the gender differences found in the results of three experiments, described in Chapter 4. In these experiments, men and women in long-term, intimate relationships reacted differently to a temporary sense of power, in terms of their tendency to self-focus, take the perspective of others, and objectify their relationship partners.In the last section, The Power to Care discusses the seemingly contradictory beliefs of professionals and laymen alike, that power corrupts, but that the empowerment processes yields positive results. In this section, the role of power and empowerment processes is discussed, mainly in macro-level interventions, in intimate partner violence (for both victims and perpetrators), overcoming addiction, and in policy practice (e.g., in court verdicts regarding cases of post-divorce relocation of custodial parents).

A response to complex problems spanning disciplinary boundaries, Worlds of ScienceCraft offers bold new ways of conceptualizing ideas of science, sociology, and philosophy. Beginning with the historical foundations of civilization and progress, assumptions about the categories we use to talk about minds, identities, and bodies are challenged through case studies from mathematics, social cognition, and medical ethics.

The past several decades have witnessed a surge in critiques of justice theory by gender, race, disability, post-colonial, non-Western, and other anti-oppression theorists. These theorists tend to reject ideal theory and instead engage in ‘theorizing’ that takes the details of people’s lives to be central to understanding and alleviating injustices. These theorists reveal injustices emerging from norms assumed in mainstream justice theory and uncover them to challenge liberal accounts of moral reasoning and responsibility rooted in individualist conceptions of the self. Instead, they defend a relational conception of selves as born into relationships and shaped by norms, institutions, and structures that determine needs, opportunities, and life prospects differently for different people and groups. Attention to real world circumstances of injustice reveals inequalities in power between developed and developing countries; former colonizers and those colonized within and across nations; and the powerful and marginalized/oppressed where racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and so on still prevail. This volume sets out to examine a range of injustices emerging from, and shaped by, histories and contexts of patriarchy, racism, colonialism, capitalism, and so on. These are the kinds of injustices that affect the lives and well-being of people at the global, national, and local levels. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Ethics and Social Welfare journal.

Honorable Mention, Sociology of the Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, given by the Body and Embodiment Section of the American Sociological Association The emotional and social components of teaching medical students to be good doctors The pelvic exam is considered a fundamental procedure for medical students to learn; it is also often the one of the first times where medical students are required to touch a real human being in a professional manner. In Feeling Medicine, Kelly Underman gives us a look inside these gynecological teaching programs, showing how they embody the tension between scientific thought and human emotion in medical education. Drawing on interviews with medical students, faculty, and the people who use their own bodies to teach this exam, Underman offers the first in-depth examination of this essential, but seldom discussed, aspect of medical education. Through studying, teaching, and learning about the pelvic exam, she contrasts the technical and emotional dimensions of learning to be a physician. Ultimately, Feeling Medicine explores what it means to be a good doctor in the twenty-first century, particularly in an era of corporatized healthcare.

In Performing Deception, Brian Rappert reconstructs the practice of entertainment magic by analysing it through the lens of perception, deception and learning, as he goes about studying conjuring himself. Through this novel meditation on reasoning and skill, Rappert elevates magic from the undertaking of mere trickery to an art that offers the basis for rethinking our possibilities for acting in the modern world. Performing Deception covers a wide range of theories in sociology, philosophy, psychology and elsewhere in order to offer a striking assessment of the way secrecy and deception are woven into social interactions, as well as the illusionary and paradoxical status of expertise.