This compilation of Parish Nurse Ministry newsletters covers three and a half years of concern for the health of body, mind, and soul. Each newsletter coincides with a calendar months concepts and aspects of life and faith: care of the heart, strokes, skin cancer, care for caregivers, the power of prayer and healing, diabetes, forgiveness, faith and health, clean air, hope, vision, and loneliness versus solitude, to name a few. And every months newsletter blends Scripture with healthful interventions to make our lives happier.

About the Author

Ruth E. Williams RN, MEPD, MSN has been a parish nurse since 1992, and an instructor of nursing for sixteen years at Viterbo University and twelve years for Southwest Wisconsin Technical College. She has been a nursing in-service director and staff nurse since the mid-seventies. The parish nurse, she says, is the listener. Parish nurses do therapeutic listening. They listen with their ears as well as their whole being and their heart. Parish nurses listen to every word of their patients/clients in order to intervene for their need, to help them spiritually, physically, and emotionally. This was the subject for her masters thesis Use of Active Listening as an Intervention by RNs in Hospitals, Nursing Homes, Community Health Agencies and Other Areas of Practice, 1991. Williams has lived in Richland Center, Wisconsin, for over fifty years. She has been active in the La Crosse Catholic Charities board, the American Cancer Society, the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and the Wisconsin Public Television Advisory Board, among other community service organizations, and the website for Parish Nursing (www.parishnurseheartland.com). Her spare time is taken up with reading, art, music, dancing, gardening, teaching, skiing, bridge-playing, and the grandchildren her six children have blessed her with.