Religion, Spirituality, and Public Health

Karen O’Brien-Kop is lecturer in Asian Religions at King’s College London. She works on Hindu and Buddhist mind-body philosophies in South Asian Sanskrit texts as well as critical perspectives in contemporary religious cultures. She has published Rethinking ‘Classical’ Yoga and Buddhism: Meditation, Metaphors and Materiality (Bloomsbury 2021) and articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Indian Philosophy, Journal of the British Academy and Religious Studies. She is co-editor of the journal Religions of South Asia and co-chair of the Indian and Chinese Religions in Dialogue research unit at the American Academy of Religion. Suzanne Newcombe is a Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University (UK) and the director of Inform, based in Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London. Much of her work has focused on investigating the popularization of yoga in the modern period. From 2015-2020 she was a researcher on the European Research Council project AYURYOG: Entangled Histories of Yoga, Ayurveda and Alchemy in South Asia. Since 2001, she has also explored different aspects of health and healing in a variety of new and minority religions through her work with Inform.

• Section 1. Nuancing Concepts in Health Epistemology 1. Introduction: Complementary and Competing Epistemes – Religion, Science and Truth in a Healthcare Crisis Suzanne Newcombe and Karen O’Brien-Kop 2. Health Beliefs and Embodied Rationalities: A Pluriversal Philosophy of Lived Religion Karen O’Brien-Kop (King’s College London, UK)Section 2. Competing Ontologies: Elasticity of Truth and Meaning3. Religion, Spirituality, Episteme: Transreligious Epistemologies in Health, Wellbeing and Covid-19 Eugenia Roussou (Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia, Portugal) 4. Trust and Doubt in the Internet Age: QAnon, Vaccine Hesitancy, and the Politics of Belief Quinton Deeley (King’s College London, UK)Section 3. Power, Authority and Contested Truths: Belief and Public Health5. Experience, Knowledge and Expertise: Traditional Medicine and Infectious Fevers in Contemporary India V Sujatha (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India) 6. Iran’s Clerical Power and Modern Medicine in the Age of Covid-19 Hormoz Ebrahimnejad (Southampton, UK)Section 4. Pragmatic Complementarity: Healing and Marginalised Epistemologies 7. Pentecostal Africans and Divine Healing in ‘Secular’ Britain Abel Ugba (Leeds, UK) 8. COVID-19 and the Understanding of Illnesses in Urban Korean musok Liora Sarfati (Tel Aviv, Israel) 9. Spiritual Technologies: Afro-Brazilian Religious Epistemologies and Healing During Covid Joana Bahia (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)Section 5. Bridging Strategies: Experience and Biomedical Research10. Placebo Effects, Qi, and Intention: How Biomedical Hegemony Polices Competing Paradigms Kin Cheung (Moravian, USA) 11. Daoist Meditation as Guided Framework in Psychedelic Self-Care and Therapy Dominic Steavu (Santa Barbara, USA) 12. The importance of Interrogating the Experiential Episteme: Yoga, Indian Medicine and Rhetorical Strategies of Epistemic Capital Suzanne Newcombe (Open University, UK) 13. Epistemes, Epistemologies and Public Health: Some Distinctions Ramprasad Chakravarthi (Lancaster, UK)

"The studies in this volume present deep, thoughtful and nuanced reflections on the difficult subject of medicine across cultures and across epistemes. It is too easy to approach health issues, especially public health, in oppositional terms, with hard boundaries regarding clinical testing, health insurance and professional licensing. All such boundaries are in various degrees permeable and imperfect. Nobody wishes to exclude the critical health support that can be provided by the priest, the mother, the friend, the herb, the prayer, the community. All these issues have been thrown into stark relief by the experience of COVID-19 that, if anything, has taught us all how complicated appropriate health care can be in practice. This volume offers some of the best contemporary thinking on these difficult subjects." Dominik Wujastyk, Professor Emeritus of Classical Indian History, University of Alberta