Overview
Religion, Spirituality, and Public Health focuses on exploring the role of different ‘ways of knowing’ or arriving at truth, i.e. epistemes, particularly those found in religious and alternative health milieus. While biomedical solutions offer a dominant narrative, these are articulated differently in global contexts. Moreover, individuals often draw upon alternative framings that are sometimes oppositional to and at other times engaged with directives from medical and governmental authorities. The focus of this volume is worldviews and epistemes that are often marginalised or rejected in dominant discourses — from shamanism in Korea to African Pentecostalism in Britain, and from global online ‘AntiVax’ narratives to traditional Siddha medicine in South India. Detailed case studies explore the contested, competing and strategically aligned relationships between mainstream and marginal epistemes; between religious healing, spirituality and biomedicine; and between politics and belief. These explorations promote greater insight into how marginalised religious epistemes are employed. Which beliefs and practices are drawn upon to create meaningful and effective responses? And how can we better understand the depth and breadth of these reactions to design more successful public health strategies for future global health crises?
Full Product Details
Author: Karen O'Brien-Kop ,
Suzanne Newcombe
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Imprint: The British Academy
Volume: 278
ISBN: 9781836245643
ISBN 10: 1836245645
Pages: 298
Publication Date: 21 October 2025
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
""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 ""One of the most pressing issues in global public health today is the tension between irreconcilable epistemes or ways of knowing. Whether arising in debates over the efficacy of vaccines, in the integration of traditional medicines, or in the role of religion and spirituality in responses to infectious diseases, epistemic issues have become ubiquitous in contemporary public health discourses. This important volume traces the contours of some of these debates, highlighting struggles between marginalized and dominant discourses in diverse places such as India, Iran, Africa, Korea, Brazil, and the West. The authors provide us valuable critical tools and methods for understanding public health challenges in the globalized contemporary world."" - Professor Pierce Salguero, Professor of Asian History & Health Humanities, Program Chair in Health Humanities, Penn State University’s Abington College ""This is an impressive collection of essays that tackles the difficult nexus of religion, spirituality and public health. It foregrounds important debates about the different epistemes of religion and science, and helpfully grounds these in specific cases of diverse religions and spiritualities in their historical and geographical specificities. Informative and thought-provoking, bridging philosophy and practice."" - Professor Lily Kong FBA, President, Singapore Management University
""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
Author Information
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.
