King's College London

Religion, Spirituality and Public Health: Competing and Complementary Epistemes is a new open-access book by Dr Karen O'Brien-Kop and Dr Suzanne Newcombe, King's Department of Theology & Religious Studies. It explores how health and wellbeing decisions are part of a multi-layered process and challenges assumptions of ‘culture wars’ between biomedicine and ‘alternatives’ and between biomedical scientific thinking and religious or ‘traditional’ ontologies.

The book explores the way the religious and scientific spheres of human activity can be understood as connected and implicated in many decisions about health and wellbeing on both the individual and public policy levels.

Each chapter engages with specific communities on their own terms, resisting ‘oversimplified and often belittling’ encounters that have characterised relationships between public health and religion. The editors draw on a series of global case studies to explore how pragmatic, pluralistic decisions are made within contexts shaped by apparently incompatible ontologies, including gods, ancestors, spirits, biomedical interventions and traditional frameworks for promoting health. Public health policy is examined at national and state levels in Iran and Tamil Nadu in India, while individual experiences are explored through case studies set in the NHS in Britain, Korean musok traditions and Afro-Brazilian religiosity. Other chapters consider the role of ontological framing in health and healing, examining its influence on compliance with public health policy and on the growing popularity of ‘self-healing’ practices involving psychedelics.

Dr O'Brien-Kop and Dr Newcombe explain; “If we are going to design more inclusive policy and look at simple, practical ways to alleviate suffering, we must pay more attention to the pragmatic pluralities that more accurately describe how people navigate their life choices. And in relation to public health, we should also take seriously conspiracy-theorising as an epistemological act and system that is underpinned by persuasive reasoning and rationalities. Without understanding the functioning of such theorising, public health policy is weakened in its attempts to address the spread and appeal of counter-factual claims, particularly in minority or minoritised communities."

This book aims to advance the conversation between biomedical science, religion and belief, as well as cultivate a more honest assessment about the types and value of specific knowledge-making practices that coexist in the contemporary world.

The book is available in print format and as open-access research in downloadable ePub/PDF format from Liverpool University Press.