A Handbook for Caring Science

This book merges the full spectrum of Caring Science evolution and identifies a clear path for future growth and development. It provides an opportunity to experience the delicate space of praxis, as the examples of a living philosophy are made accessible to the reader. The book through personal narrative, exemplars, and discourses on Caring Science, helps the reader to understand the history, accomplishments, and vision of human caring as a serious ethical, ontological, epistemological, practical endeavor. Its intent is to create a compendium of cutting-edge literature related to Caring Science to inform and transform nursing practice. The book comprises 50 chapters and is structured with 10 sections, each focused on a particular theme. Section I assumes that nursing knowledge is evolving towards a unitary-transformative worldview, and the ontology of Caring Science is embracing the tenets of this unitary worldview. Section II describes explicit connections between established programs or initiatives and Caring Science. Section III discuses Caritas science literacy. Section IV is on caritas literacy as a foundation for nursing education. Section V focuses on how scholarly inquiry advances the epistemology of Caring Science in the areas of leadership, research, and education. Section VI explores epistemology of research, aesthetic knowing (healing environments), and Caritas Praxis. Section VII integrates Caring Science grounded in Watson’s Theory of Human Caring and the 10 Caritas Processes into large complex healthcare systems. Section VIII reflects the process of Caring Science and cross-cultural (transcultural) ethical significance that is being developed in many parts of the world. Section IX focuses on advancing disciplinary-specific knowledge grounded in a relational unitary worldview within the context of Unitary Caring Science. The final section focuses on how Caring Science can become a journey of personal and professional transformation engaging in aesthetic ways of knowing.