1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Medicine, and Health
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
Pamela E. Klassen, Philipp Hetmanczyk, Dorothea Lüddeckens, and Justin B. Stein
Part I. Healing practices with religious roots and frames
1. Afro-Atlantic healing practices
Maarit Forde
2. Ayurveda: the modern faces of ‘Vedic’ healing and sacred science
Maya Warrier
3. Curanderismo in the Americas
Brett Hendrickson
4. Healing traditions in sub-Saharan Africa
Walter Bruchhausen
5. Homeopathy and chiropractic in the United States and beyond
Holly Folk
6. ‘Mind Cure’ and mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs)
Wakoh Shannon Hickey
7. The hospice movement, palliative care, and Anthroposophy in Europe
Barbara Zeugin
8. Spiritual healing in Latin America
Bettina E. Schmidt
9. Traditional Chinese medicine: history, ethnography, and practice
Elisabeth Hsu
10. Unani medicine: health, religion, and politics in colonial India
Seema Alavi
Part II. Religious actors in and around the medical field
11. Diagnosing materialism: Ayurvedic purification regimens as spiritual cure
Jean M. Langford
12. Buddhist spiritual caregivers in Japan
Hara Takahashi
13. Chaplains and spiritual caregivers in American healthcare organizations
Wendy Cadge and Michael Skaggs
14. Muslim healthcare chaplaincy in North America and Europe: professionalizing a communal obligation
Lance D. Laird, Samsiah Abdul Majid, and Magda L. Mohamed
15. Charismatic healers: embodied practices in US and Singaporean megachurches
Katja Rakow
16. Energy healing: Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, and Healing Touch in the United States and beyond
Justin B. Stein
17. Gurus and healing: Amma (Mata Amritanandamyi) at the intersection of miracles and medicine
Amanda Lucia
18. Medical missionaries and witch doctors: Protestant object lessons in biomedicine in Africa and the South Pacific
Daniel Midena
19. Rabbinic authority and reproductive medicine in Israel
Tsipy Ivry and Elly Teman
PART III. Organizing infrastructures of religion and medicine: pluralism and competition
20. Digital tools for fertility awareness: family planning, health, religion, and feminine embodiment
Florence Pasche Guignard
21. The Internet as infrastructure for healing: the case of spirit possession in Japan
Birgit Staemmler
22. Markets of medicine: orthodox medicine, complementary and alternative medicine, and religion in Britain
Mike Saks
23. Medical pluralism in policy and practice: the case of Malaysia
Md. Nazrul Islam
24. Midwifery and traditional birth attendants in transnational perspective
Sarah A. Williams and Janice Boddy
25. Postcolonial medicine in African contexts
Nolwazi Mkhwanazi
26. Religious entrepreneurs in the health market: opportunities in a field dominated by biomedicine
Markus Hero
Part IV. Boundary-making between religion and medicine
27. Policing the boundaries of medical science: causality, evidence, and the question of religion
Robert C. Fuller
28. Competing religious and biomedical notions of treatment: the case of blood transfusion refusals
Małgorzata Rajtar
29. Ayurveda (re-)invented: engagements with science and religion in colonial India
Poonam Bala
30. Nurses on the frontline of secular and religious knowledges
Sheryl Reimer-Kirkham
31. Religion, culture, and the politics of vaccine hesitancy: perspectives of parents, pundits, and physicians
Paul Bramadat
32. The World Health Organization’s production and enactment of spirituality
Rodrigo Toniol
33. Contemporary psychiatry and psychotherapy’s engagements with religion/spirituality in Europe and North America
Dorothea Lüddeckens and Thomas Lüddeckens
Part V. Religion and epidemics
34. Religion, ‘the Chinese virus,’ and perceptions of Asian Americans as a moral and medical menace
Melissa May Borja
35. Defying responsibility: modes of silence, religious symbolism, and biopolitics in the COVID-19 pandemic
Britta Ohm
36. Christianity and the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States
Jonathan D. Riddle
37. The impact of COVID-19 on religion in Japan
Levi McLaughlin
38. A cultural map of the pandemic
Tamar El Or
Biography
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.
