Abstract
A global pandemic shifts many things into new perspective, including the connections between religion, medicine, and healing. The danger posed by a virus like SARS-CoV-2 reveals how the flow of people, their views of the body, and their communal practices can have wide-ranging personal and systemic consequences. The chapter provides the resources for researchers, professors, students, and healthcare practitioners who want to better understand how religious beliefs, ritual practices, and ideas of spirituality matter for healthcare systems everywhere, but in different ways according to place, time, and tradition. Boundary crossing and boundary maintenance is the focus of the fourth section, which considers how boundary making across the fields of religion and medicine occurs through complex processes of negotiating authoritative knowledge. Religion and medicine are intersecting discourses through which particular modes of healing are framed as differently legitimate, powerful, and effective.
Klassen, Pamela E