Gary R Gunderson – författare

Bringing together an impressive array of internationally recognised experts, the Handbook on Religion and Health outlines a number of conceptual and theoretical frameworks for the field. Chapters examine religion and health on the micro, macro, and meso levels, before analysing wider, more holistic understandings of religion and health, through ecological, de-colonial, and sociological perspectives. Chapter authors also assess religion and health from the grassroots, and the centrality of the community to experiences of disease and spirituality.

Expertly traversing an interdisciplinary area which is constantly expanding, this Handbook is a fascinating resource for students and scholars of health policy, religious studies, and cultural sociology. It will also appeal to practitioners and policy makers in global organisations operating in the public health sector.

The long-awaited convergence of climate, economic, political, intellectual, faith and social failures gives many reasons for despair. The authors of this volume have spent their lives around the trauma of race and poverty in South Africa and the United States working with Nobel prize winners and those in townships and tenements. We have learned that hope is not delusional and accountability not naïve. But one must think clearly and deeply, untethered from the inadequate simplicities and false choices. We must be here now, with eyes wide open for when systems break down, as so many are today, knowing that they also break open new space for creative action.The authors lead the global web of thinker-doers through the Leading Causes of Life Initiative and national networks in Africa, Europe and the United States. They find coherence among profound thinking from fields never brought into alignment before drawn from by economists, mycelial researchers, anthropologists and health sciences working in the Artic to South Africa, and the tough neighbourhoods in between. This includes a consideration of the human capacities that allow us to act in and transform the world we inhabit, of the radical nature of joy in the face of despair, of the judgement of Nemesis on hubris and privilege, of the ‘value of everything’ contra price as definitive, of the idea of involution as distinguished from evolution, of the concept of ‘meshworks’ in our entanglement with others, and, finally, of the ‘theatre of the soul’ as the unity of the physical, the psychological, the political and the spiritual.Sharply sensitive to the urgency of careful thought and wise action, the authors help us see that life does find a way towards deep accountability for the life of complex human ecosystems. They ask us to take responsibility for this as a key to human flourishing and well-being.