About Spirituality and Religion in Health

This collection is now closed to submissions.

Religious and spiritual identity are now recognized as significant forces in shaping choices and ideas around health, illness, vaccination and healing. Indeed, the past few decades have seen a rapidly growing body of scholarship regarding the impacts of spirituality and religion on health outcomes. This literature has highlighted that religious and spiritual practices can provide individuals with frameworks and resources to manage health problems in meaningful ways, sometimes drawing on themes including suffering and guilt found in sacred texts. In more recent times, the COVID-19 pandemic illustrated how religion and spirituality can influence not only the health of individuals, but also communities and societies at a wider scale. This sheds light on questions concerning how religious and spiritual institutions deal with health crises and understand them in the context of their own theological ideology, and how governments and societies can work alongside such institutions to strive for positive population health outcomes. 

This Collection invites submissions investigating a range of topics at the intersection between religion and spirituality, and health beliefs, behaviours and policies. Subjects of interest may include, but are not limited to: 

• Health benefits, risks and other impacts of religion and spirituality on physical and mental health 
• How religious or spiritual organizations can facilitate public health programs  
• Healing within the physical and mental contexts
• Measures of religion and spirituality in health contexts  
• Religion and spirituality in pandemics  
• The link between sin and suffering 
• Illness and religious healing 

It is hoped that this Collection will allow readers a greater understanding, both practically and theoretically, of such issues. Further, the scope of this Collection is intended to be both interdisciplinary and international, and submissions are welcome from those working within a wide range of disciplines where religion, spirituality and public health concerns converge, including the social sciences, humanities, and health sciences. Both academics and health professionals working within these domains are encouraged to submit to the Collection. However, please note that articles concerning alternative medicine are out of scope for this Collection – focus should be centred around the sociology of health, as opposed to on health practices themselves. Submissions in the form of research articles, case studies, clinical practice reports and policy briefs are particularly welcome.  

Keywords: Religion, spirituality, health, health-related behaviours, pandemic, public health programs, health outcomes, healing 

Any questions about this Collection? Please email research@f1000.com
 
Please note that articles submitted to this Collection will be subject to all of F1000's standard pre-publication checks, and will follow our usual process for open peer review.