In recent years, sociologists have been much concerned with the nature of communication and its consequences, but little attention, even in the sociology of religion, has been given to the idea of communication between human society and other worlds. Divine communication is sociologically interesting as a communication puzzle: authentic religious communication tends to be ineffable and hence it requires considerable intellectual work by experts to translate it into the effable domain. The ineffability of religious inspiration is associated with hierarchical structures (...) in societies with high illiteracy, because the untutored laity cannot readily interpret such messages expertly. The arrival of an information society and extensive literacy presupposes some degree of democratization and in particular an emphasis on — to conjure up a word strangely missing from modern English — effability. This transition from the hierarchical/ineffable to the horizontal/ effable implies a profound change in systems of authority in society and hence a transformation of the relationships between formal and popular religion. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of the international nursing community the discrepancy between a pervasive ‘caring’ nursing discourse and a most unethical nursing practice in the United States. In this article, we present a duality: the conflict in American prisons between nursing ethics and the killing machinery. The US penal system is a setting in which trained healthcare personnel practice the extermination of life. We look upon the sanitization of deathwork as an application of (...) healthcare professionals’ skills and knowledge and their appropriation by the state to serve its ends. A review of the states’ death penalty statutes shows that healthcare workers are involved in the capital punishment process and shielded by American laws (and to a certain extent by professional boards through their inaction). We also argue that the law's language often masks that involvement; and explain how states further that duplicity behind legal formalisms. In considering the important role healthcare providers, namely nurses and physicians, play in administering death to the condemned, we assert that nurses and physicians are part of the states’ penal machinery in America. Nurses and physicians (as carriers of scientific knowledge, and also as agents of care) are intrinsic to the American killing enterprise. Healthcare professionals who take part in execution protocols are state functionaries who approach the condemned body as angels of death: they constitute an extension of the state which exercises its sovereign power over captive prisoners. (shrink)