Category: Handbook on Religion and Health

Five hundred and six pages. Thirty-three authors. A big book. So, a warning, this is sort of a big blog.

It’s about the Handbook on Religion and Health: Pathways toward a Turbulent Future (Edward Elgar, UK), which focuses on the complex way that faith at social scale, for better or worse, shapes health and well-being … so that we can make the choices that lead toward life for the people and places that are ours to love. That itself is a big sentence which hints at the need of a big book. The Handbook dares to mark a pivot toward a whole new phase in the intellectual understanding of faith and health. All of its authors, many well known in their fields, were asked to step away from what they already knew and look forward. They did that.

There have really only been three eras before now defining that relationship. The first lasted three billion years when the dimensions of what humans eventually called faith, which eventually evolved into religion and even more eventually science, were simply and utterly part of the whole.

That first era was capped by a flurry of thinking once we humans accumulated enough frontal matter that we could name ourselves boldly homo sapiens sapiens (the human that knows it knows). For all this time religion, including faeries, YHWH, Jesus and all the saints and scientists were in one intellectual stewpot for better—and often for worse in the hands of the powerful.

The first phase lasted roughly up till the “Enlightenment” in the 1700s, during which pretty much everything thought to that point was unthought. It became obvious to every rational intellectual that we didn’t really need religion at all to map what was known and knowable. Religion was intellectual detritus that obstructed clear thinking or, at best, needed to be shown to be reasonable.

The Enlightenment glow went out in the middle of the last century, seared by murderous gas ovens, nuclear blasts and, now, 129-degree summers. We’ve been in an intellectual wilderness of post-modern, post-industrial, post-constitution, post-language, post, post, post, post everything. The boundaries have evaporated including, to the dismay of the left-over Enlightenment thinkers, the rise of religion entirely untethered to any social or political norms, logic or facts.

The echo-chamber world of academic health research with its pristine peer-reviewing world of double-blind control trials ignored all the dismal wilderness outside (making it triple-blind). But late in the day, this era acknowledged minor claims that religion was a variable in human health. Each of these footnotes squeezed through a tortuous process that fundamentally considered any signs of religiosity to be a false signal, better explained by a bio-chemistry or abnormal psychiatric phenomena. In fact, the American Psychiatric Association had disease codes for religion until the 1970s.

It is important to remember that the simplifying secularists had a point; much of what is attributed to religion—by both believers and those who scoff—is a false signal, often harnessed for tribal, parochial interests that can be stupid and dangerous, especially at political scale. And it’s important to not trash the traditional research models that were superb at knowing what they considered knowable partly by rigorously excluding things not.

Still, the end of this era was marked by the article in Journal of the American Medical Association two years ago (Balboni, VanderWelle, Doan-Soares, et al., 2022). The Harvard team laboriously sorted through thousands of articles that claimed findings of spirituality in health for the few meeting the very highest standards of peer-reviewed studies. Only a thin gruel could pass through the thin intellectual mesh, but even those findings came as a shock to the field. It is also important to note that one of the problems in associating spirituality as a variable is that nobody agrees on what it is, which suggests that maybe it doesn’t exist at all.

That study would not have happened without the four pillars that begin with the earlier Handbook by Larson and Koenig, followed by the basic texts of Oman and Idler. This is why the JAMA article marks the end of the era, making possible a new beginning.

This brings us to the 506-page start of the fourth era, the Handbook on [Formerly Known as] Religion and [Formerly Known as] Health: Pathways for a Turbulent Future.  I add ‘formerly known as’ deliberately. The new era lives in the science of complexity, and multi-variant phenomenological study of complex phenomena that begins with the assumption that humans are in our every facet biological, psychological, social and spirted. Most of the traditional gatekeepers do not think that way and remain especially uncomfortable with taking the phenomena “formerly known as religion” seriously. Dr. Paul Laurienti addresses this in his chapter in the Handbook, noting that those fields are busy “harmonizing” research methodology based on the old accepted processes that methodologically exclude any surprises. “Who needs a new era?” they would ask.

The Handbook is disruptive in another whole way because it grows from the Leading Causes of Life. Even the spiritual part of the last era was driven a great deal by the spirituality interested in death, dying and the closely linked clinical chaplaincy. The era has more to work with. The Handbook (Ch. 28, pp. 456-57) argues that

“Looking at humanity as a living system invites us toward an integrative generative practice that does not collapse in the simplicities of upstream-downstream instrumental intervention. To be deeply accountable for the whole of the social watershed invites the immediacy of picking up one’s own trash before it can contaminate the lives of those to whom it would otherwise flow. And it invites humility before all that we have received for good or ill. This posture of always being both recipients of blessings we did not create and stewards of the blessings that will flow through us is what the Leading Causes of Life call intergenerativity, or simply blessing. When we are conscious of being in this right relationship–recipient and steward—we feel something like awe, gratitude and being in the right place.”

This is not good news to all the traditional researchers who have based their careers and methodology on the previous models. Even those intellectuals talking about complexity do not quite honor the complex generativity of the psycho-social-spirited phenomena. We are not an interplay of calories or protein but consciousness of the whole becoming more vital and prosilient. This is part of how “what was known as religion” functions in synergy with the thing “formerly known as health”—the vital phenomena, not just biochemical or material, but consciously alive on all levels.

While the traditional researchers will perhaps not be happy to find that their academic cheese has moved, this Handbook is a three-pound thrill for the next generations of hard thinkers. And it is happy not to conclude anything:

“Perhaps we have only begun. Neither religion or the health sciences quite thinks this way about its work or way. This is not how we collect or analyse data and thus not the way we regard the possibilities of what we might learn from research (maybe we say, formerly known as research). But even asking whether we could learn more and thus be more accountable for possibilities and cannier about risks shifts us just a bit. As is evident in other chapters in this handbook, new methodologies, new norms of transdisciplinary dialogue and analysis will emerge, just as new shared language does in El Paso, Texas, and other borderlands—objective and subjective—around the world.” (Ch. 28, p. 457)

This may not be the last 506 pages needed. But it’s a good start ….

// The Handbook on Religion and Health: Pathways for a Turbulent Future is available in hardback immediately (priced for academic libraries!), with an eBook coming in a week or two (~$48) and, we hope (not yet confirmed), a paperback to follow later. Most of my friends will wait for the paperback or eBook! I’ll let you know when they are available.

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