Drawing on rich ethnographic and survey data collected over a four-year period, Cherry’s study explores the role Catholicism plays in shaping the professional and community lives of foreign-born Filipino and Indian American nurses. Their stories provide unique insights into the often-unseen roles race, religion, and gender play in the daily lives of new immigrants employed in American healthcare. Seeing nursing as a religious calling, they care for their patients with a sense of divine purpose but must also confront the cultural tensions and disconnects between how they were raised and trained in another country and the legal separation of church and state. How they cope with and engage these tensions plays an important role in not only shaping how they see themselves as Catholic nurses, but their place in the new American story.
 

STEPHEN M. CHERRY is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Houston-Clear Lake in Texas. He is the author of Faith, Family, and Filipino American Community Life (Rutgers University Press). 
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Chapter One: Veterans and a Crisis of Care
Chapter Two: Colonialism, Christian Culture and Nursing Care
Chapter Three: New American Battlefields
Chapter Four: Understanding and Coping with the Trauma of War
Chapter Five: Faith and the Practice of Care
Chapter Six: Extending Health and Care to Community
Chapter Seven: Who Will Care for America?