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What role does religion play at the end of life in Japan? Spiritual
Ends draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with hospice
patients, chaplains, and medical workers to provide an intimate
portrayal of how spiritual care is provided to the dying in Japan.
Timothy O. Benedict uses both local and cross-cultural perspectives to
show how hospice caregivers in Japan are appropriating and
reinterpreting global ideas about spirituality and the practice of
spiritual care. Benedict relates these findings to a longer story of how
Japanese religious groups have pursued vocational roles in medical
institutions as a means to demonstrate a so-called "healthy" role in
society. By paying attention to how care for the kokoro (heart or
mind) is key to the practice of spiritual care, this book enriches
conventional understandings of religious identity in Japan while
offering a valuable East Asian perspective to global conversations on
the ways religion, spirituality, and medicine intersect at death.