Why Religion and Spirituality Matter for Public Health ― Evidence, Implications, and Resources

This volume reviews the exploding religion/spirituality (R/S) and health literature from a population health perspective. It emphasizes the distinctive Public Health concern for promoting health and preventing disease in societies, nations, and communities, as well as individuals. Part I offers a rigorous review of mainstream biomedical and social scientific theory and evidence on R/S-health relations. Addressing key gaps in previous literature, it reviews evidence from a population health viewpoint, surveying pertinent findings and theories from the perspective of Public Health subfields that range from Environmental Health Sciences to Public Health Nutrition to Health Policy & Management and Public Health Education. In Part II, practitioners describe in detail how attending to R/S factors enhances the work of clinicians and community health practitioners. R/S provides an additional set of concepts and tools to address opportunities and challenges ranging from behavior and institutional change to education, policy, and advocacy. Part III empowers educators, analyzing pedagogical needs and offering diverse short chapters by faculty who teach R/S-health connections in many nationally top-ranked Schools of Public Health. International and global perspectives are highlighted in a concluding chapter and many places throughout the volume.

This book addresses a pressing need for Public Health research, practice and teaching: A substantial evidence base now links religious and spiritual (R/S) factors to health. In the past 20 years, over 100 systematic reviews and 30 meta-analyses on R/S-health were published in refereed journals. But despite this explosion of interest, R/S factors remain neglected in Public Health teaching and research. Public Health lags behind related fields such as medicine, psychology, and nursing, where R/S factors receive more attention. This book can help Public Health catch up. It offers abundant key resources to empower public health professionals, instructors, and students to address R/S, serving at once as a course text, a field manual and a research handbook.

Doug Oman received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, where he is Associate Adjunct Professor in the School of Public Health. His more than 60 professional publications focus especially on health and longevity implications of spiritual and religious factors, as well as related psychosocial factors such as compassion and altruism. Oman has been principal investigator for two randomized trials of nonsectarian and explicitly spiritual forms of meditation, and was elected President (2016-2017) of the Society for the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality (Division 36 of the American Psychological Association). His 1998 paper, “Religion and Mortality Among the Community-Dwelling Elderly” was awarded the Templeton prize for Exemplary Paper in Religion and the Medical Sciences.