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Reveals the role of faith in adolescent and young adult cancer care
Despite polemical debates that cast religious and secular traditions as fundamentally incompatible, many cancer patients and caregivers actively combine them in attempts to maximize hope and faith in the possibility of living beyond cancer.
Drawing on fieldwork carried out at a children’s hospital in California, Surviving the Children’s Cancer Ward illustrates how patients and caregivers regularly draw on religious traditions as supplements to oncology. In addition to the aid of non-human spiritual agents, patients and caregivers often relied on the help of their fellow religious community members, who provided valuable sources of everyday care and support throughout the ups and downs of the treatment process. While many adolescent and young adult patients and caregivers drew support, hope, and faith from religious traditions and communities, Anthony Gerard Wright also shows that religious commitments acted as a source of conflict within some families. Similar types of conflicts also emerged between avowedly secular parents and patients, who attempted to intervene when patients showed little interest in practices that were perceived as essential to sustaining hope and faith in the possibility of surviving cancer.
By exploring how a complex and shifting mix of religious and secular traditions shape experiences and relationships between adolescent and young adult cancer patients and their caregivers, Surviving the Children’s Cancer Ward expands our understanding of the role of hope and faith in cancer treatment.
Wright's sensitive ethnography introduces the reader to children with cancer, their parents and siblings, their medical professionals, and the art and music therapists and volunteers who support them. These people are simultaneously and intermittently strong and weak, resolute and depressed, motivated and exhausted in the context of cancer care and adolescence. Everyone interested in adolescence and young adulthood, childhood and assumptions of what is and is not child-appropriate, parenthood and family, secular and non-secular faith and hope, cancer and cancer treatment will meet inspiring, compelling, unique individuals in the pages of this carefully written book.