The relationships between religion, spirituality, health, biomedical institutions, complementary and alternative healing systems are widely discussed today. This book is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind.
The relationships between religion, spirituality, health, biomedical institutions, complementary, and alternative healing systems are widely discussed today. While many of these debates revolve around the biomedical legitimacy of religious modes of healing, the market for them continues to grow. The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health is an outstanding reference source to the key topics, problems, and debates in this exciting subject and is the first collection of its kind. Comprising over thirty-five chapters by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into five parts:
- Healing practices with religious roots and frames
- Religious actors in and around the medical field
- Organizing infrastructures of religion and medicine: pluralism and competition
- Boundary-making between religion and medicine
- Religion and epidemics
Within these sections, central issues, debates and problems are examined, including health and healing, religiosity, spirituality, biomedicine, medicalization, complementary medicine, medical therapy, efficacy, agency, and the nexus of body, mind, and spirit.
The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as sociology, anthropology, and medicine.
Introduction: critical approaches to the entanglement of religion,
medicine, and healing Part I. Healing practices with religious roots and
frames
1. Afro-Atlantic healing practices
2. Ayurveda: the modern faces of
Vedic healing and sacred science
3. Curanderismo in the Americas
4. Healing
traditions in sub-Saharan Africa
5. Homeopathy and chiropractic in the United
States and beyond
6. Mind Cure and mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs)
7. The hospice movement, palliative care, and Anthroposophy in Europe
8.
Spiritual healing in Latin America
9. Traditional Chinese medicine: history,
ethnography, and practice
10. Unani medicine: health, religion, and politics
in colonial India Part II. Religious actors in and around the medical field
11. Diagnosing materialism: Ayurvedic purification regimens as spiritual cure
12. Buddhist spiritual caregivers in Japan
13. Chaplains and spiritual
caregivers in American healthcare organizations
14. Muslim healthcare
chaplaincy in North America and Europe: professionalizing a communal
obligation
15. Charismatic healers: embodied practices in US and Singaporean
megachurches
16. Energy healing: Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, and Healing Touch
in the United States and beyond
17. Gurus and healing: Amma (Mata
Amritanandamyi) at the intersection of miracles and medicine
18. Medical
missionaries and witch doctors: Protestant object lessons in biomedicine in
Africa and the South Pacific
19. Rabbinic authority and reproductive medicine
in Israel PART III. Organizing infrastructures of religion and medicine:
pluralism and competition
20. Digital tools for fertility awareness: family
planning, health, religion, and feminine embodiment
21. The Internet as
infrastructure for healing: the case of spirit possession in Japan
22.
Markets of medicine: orthodox medicine, complementary and alternative
medicine, and religion in Britain
23. Medical pluralism in policy and
practice: the case of Malaysia
24. Midwifery and traditional birth attendants
in transnational perspective
25. Postcolonial medicine in African contexts
26. Religious entrepreneurs in the health market: opportunities in a field
dominated by biomedicine Part IV. Boundary-making between religion and
medicine
27. Policing the boundaries of medical science: causality, evidence,
and the question of religion
28. Competing religious and biomedical notions
of treatment: the case of blood transfusion refusals
29. Ayurveda
(re-)invented: engagements with science and religion in colonial India
30.
Nurses on the frontline of secular and religious knowledges
31. Religion,
culture, and the politics of vaccine hesitancy: perspectives of parents,
pundits, and physicians
32. The World Health Organizations production and
enactment of spirituality
33. Contemporary psychiatry and psychotherapys
engagements with religion/spirituality in Europe and North America Part V.
Religion and epidemics
34. Religion, the Chinese virus, and perceptions of
Asian Americans as a moral and medical menace
35. Defying responsibility:
modes of silence, religious symbolism, and biopolitics in the COVID-19
pandemic
36. Christianity and the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States
37.
The impact of COVID-19 on religion in Japan
38. A cultural map of the pandemic
Dorothea Lüddeckens is Professor for the Study of Religions with a social scientific orientation at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Philipp Hetmanczyk is a teaching and research staff member of the Department for the Study of Religions at the University of Zurich, Switzerland.
Pamela E. Klassen is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, Canada.
Justin B. Stein is Instructor in the Department of Asian Studies, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, British Columbia, Canada.
