Let Him Hold You: Spiritual and Social Support in a Catholic Convent Infirmary

American Catholic nuns have been found to age more ‘successfully’ than their lay counterparts, living longer, healthier, and happier lives.  Two of the key factors contributing to the nuns’ physical and mental wellbeing are the spiritual support they experience from the divine and the social support they provide for and receive from each other in the convent.  I argue that by integrating the divine into their everyday interactions, the nuns engage in phenomenological meaning-making process through which mundane care interactions are rendered sacred. This communicative process, I argue, contributes to the nuns’ overall wellbeing by providing an enriched form of care and support, thereby enhancing their end-of-life experience

Let Him Hold You: Spiritual and Social Support in a Catholic Convent Infirmary

American Catholic nuns have been found to age more ‘successfully’ than their lay counterparts, living longer, healthier, and happier lives.  Two of the key factors contributing to the nuns’ physical and mental wellbeing are the spiritual support they experience from the divine and the social support they provide for and receive from each other in the convent.  I argue that by integrating the divine into their everyday interactions, the nuns engage in phenomenological meaning-making process through which mundane care interactions are rendered sacred. This communicative process, I argue, contributes to the nuns’ overall wellbeing by providing an enriched form of care and support, thereby enhancing their end-of-life experience

Beyond behavior: Linguistic evidence of cultural variation in parental ethnotheories of children’s prosocial helping

This study examined linguistic patterns in mothers’ reports about their toddlers’ involvement in everyday household work, as a way to understand the parental ethnotheories that may guide children’s prosocial helping and development. Mothers from two cultural groups – US Mexican-heritage families with backgrounds in indigenous American communities and middle-class European-American families – were interviewed regarding how their 2- to 3-year-old toddler gets involved in help with everyday household work. The study’s analytic focus was the linguistic form of mothers’ responses to interview questions asking about the child’s efforts to help with a variety of everyday household work tasks. Results showed that mothers responded with linguistic patterns that were indicative of ethnotheoretical assumptions regarding children’s agency and children’s prosocial intentions, with notable contrasts between the two cultural groups. Nearly all US Mexican-heritage mothers reported children’s contributions and participation using linguistic forms that centered children’s agency and prosocial initiative, which corresponds with extensive evidence suggesting the centrality of both children’s autonomy and supportive prosocial expectations in how children’s helpfulness is socialized in this and similar cultural communities. By contrast, middle-class European-American mothers frequently responded to questions about their child’s efforts to help with linguistic forms that “pivoted” to either the mother as the focal agent in the child’s prosocial engagement or to reframing the child’s involvement to emphasize non-help activities. Correspondence between cultural differences in the linguistic findings and existing literature on socialization of children’s prosocial helping is discussed. Also discussed is the analytic approach of the study, uncommon in developmental psychology research, and the significance of the linguistic findings for understanding parental ethnotheories in each community

The extraordinary evolutionary history of the reticuloendotheliosis viruses

The reticuloendotheliosis viruses (REVs) comprise several closely related amphotropic retroviruses isolated from birds. These viruses exhibit several highly unusual characteristics that have not so far been adequately explained, including their extremely close relationship to mammalian retroviruses, and their presence as endogenous sequences within the genomes of certain large DNA viruses. We present evidence for an iatrogenic origin of REVs that accounts for these phenomena. Firstly, we identify endogenous retroviral fossils in mammalian genomes that share a unique recombinant structure with REVs—unequivocally demonstrating that REVs derive directly from mammalian retroviruses. Secondly, through sequencing of archived REV isolates, we confirm that contaminated Plasmodium lophurae stocks have been the source of multiple REV outbreaks in experimentally infected birds. Finally, we show that both phylogenetic and historical evidence support a scenario wherein REVs originated as mammalian retroviruses that were accidentally introduced into avian hosts in the late 1930s, during experimental studies of P. lophurae, and subsequently integrated into the fowlpox virus (FWPV) and gallid herpesvirus type 2 (GHV-2) genomes, generating recombinant DNA viruses that now circulate in wild birds and poultry. Our findings provide a novel perspective on the origin and evolution of REV, and indicate that horizontal gene transfer between virus families can expand the impact of iatrogenic transmission events

Care in Interaction: Aging, Personhood, and Meaningful Decline

Care, as it is instantiated through interaction, can both perform and shape cultural and moral understandings of what it means to be a person in the world. American Catholic nuns have been found to age more “successfully” than their peers. However, in contrast to the successful aging paradigm, an analysis of care interactions from research conducted in a Franciscan Catholic convent in the Midwestern United States reveals that the nuns practice an ideal of meaningful decline. I explore how linguistic analysis of care interactions evidence ideologies of personhood and aging, and how a model of meaningful decline (the notion that valuable personhood endures beyond productivity) is instantiated through interaction

Prayer and Care: How Elderly Nuns Sustain Well-being

Epidemiologists have identified American Catholic nuns as a group that lives longer, healthier, and more actively, experiencing less anxiety, pain, and depression than their lay counterparts. While contributing factors such as education, nutrition, physical activity, optimistic outlook, and spiritual and social support have been identified through surveys and medical examinations, this dissertation is the first to document the everyday, on-the-ground social and sacred communicative practices that may contribute to the quality of life these elderly nuns report. The dissertation is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a Midwestern Catholic convent where the elderly nuns report above-average quality of life. The dissertation identifies how a suite of institutional and communicative practices may contribute to the nuns' sense of well-being, including how their prayers are composed to garner assistance for peers in distress and how care provided by the elderly nuns themselves offers a sense of purpose to both the caregiver and recipient of care. The dissertation focuses on care interactions in the convent infirmary, examining how the nuns integrate the divine into their everyday interactions, how they imbue everyday care interactions with spiritual meaning, and how these care interactions may contribute to the nuns' aging process by providing an enriched form of support. The dissertation blends a phenomenological approach to embodiment with linguistic analysis of prayer practices, care interactions, and institutional kenotic practices to show how they may shape the nuns' experiences of illness, aging, and death. As a whole, the dissertation offers ethnographic insight into the everyday lives of elderly Catholic nuns in a convent infirmary, documenting the ways in which these nuns understand and experience well-being at the end of life