Nicolas Vonarx

Religion, spirituality, and cancer: the question of individual empowerment.

It has often been noted that people with a severe illness endeavor to deepen their religious and spiritual practice and knowledge. It is generally accepted that spiritual and religious factors help sick people confront their suffering. The authors conducted a qualitative research on the role of religious and spiritual practices and knowledge among 10 cancer patients in Québec, Canada. Individual interviews focused on their illness experience confirmed that religion and spirituality can be present and contribute to coping when life is threatened. More precisely, the analyses of the place and use of these resources during the patient’s illness showed that these resources contributed to an individual empowerment process that was undertaken in response to a biographic and existential disruption induced by the illness diagnosis. The sick people took advantage of religious and spiritual content in their quest for meaning and a cure, progressing from a stage of despair and powerlessness to a stage of hope, a critical analysis of the disease, and a better management and control of it and its evolution. This article describes how people suffering from cancer use and participate in religious and spiritual content. It demonstrates the contribution of this content to an individual empowerment process. The use of religion and spirituality constitutes a quest for self-mastery, an acquiring of power and control. We understand that religious and spiritual phenomena do not always prevent people from fighting against their suffering, limit their freedom, or systematically reduce people’s viewpoints and worldviews.

La discipline infirmière comme discipline créole : retour sur le pluriel, les emprunts et les rencontres qui l’animent

A reflection on the evolution of the nursing discipline requires us to question various motives borrowed from other disciplines. While some may be reluctant to borrow, they also believe that borrowing undermines the assertion and autonomy of the discipline itself. This text suggests defining the nursing discipline based on the merits of the confluences, heritages, and plurality that make up its landscape. Advocating that the discipline is fundamentally heterogeneous, the author demonstrates that the creole metaphor can be relevant because of the identity and interdisciplinary pitfalls that it conveys, in addition to the quest for emancipation and recognition that underlies it. From there, he illustrates the processes of syncretism that are at play using an analysis of knowledge borrowed from humanities and social sciences. By tracking the content flows, he identifies the logic of ?breaking? and reinterpreting, rendering them intelligible and relevant for the discipline of nursing. This text concludes with some requirements that would accompany the creole metaphor, supposing it were to be taken up within the discipline.

Le corps au sein de la discipline infirmière : un incontournable pour lier les quatre concepts du méta-paradigme actuel

How can we teach and practice nursing, develop knowledge and reflect on the founding principles of nursing discipline without explicitly considering the essential place of the body ? After addressing the nursing science disciplinary metaparadigm and its four central concepts, we suggest this theoretical proposal be expanded to include the body as a fifth concept, demonstrating its appropriateness in linking the other concepts, namely the person, health, environment and nursing. In this perspective, different readings of the body are thus proposed. In the variate configurations displayed, they appear as ways leading to specific microparadigms and from which it becomes possible to identify the nature of nursing and caring, as well as the types of knowledge that are useful to be taught within the nursing curriculum.