Scholarly Concentrations

Wendy Cadge and Shelly Rambo demonstrate the urgent need, highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, to position the long history and practice of chaplaincy within the rapidly changing landscape of American religion and spirituality. This book provides a much-needed road map for training and renewing chaplains across a professional continuum that spans major sectors of American society, including hospitals, prisons, universities, the military, and nursing homes. The book identifies three central competencies--individual, organizational, and meaning-making--that all chaplains must have, and it provides the resources for building those skills. Featuring profiles of working chaplains, the book positions intersectional issues of religious diversity, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and other markers of identity as central to the future of chaplaincy as a profession.

This book aims to help readers appreciate the many-faceted relationship between Christianity, one of the world's major faith traditions, and the practice of psychiatry.

Digital copies may be borrowed from the Internet Archive (select any available edition).
The judge Ivan Ilyich Golovin has spent his life in the pursuit of wealth and status, devoting himself obsessively to work and often neglecting his family in the process. When, after a small accident, he fails to make the expected recovery, it gradually becomes clear that he is soon to die. Ivan Ilyich then starts to question the futility and barrenness of his previous existence, realizing to his horror, as he grapples with the meaning of life and death, that he is totally alone.

[Recommended. Please note the first edition is a very different book based on older research]. The Handbook of Religion and Health has become the seminal research text on religion, spirituality, and health, outlining a rational argument for the connection between religion and health. The Second Edition surveys the historical connections between religion and health and grapples with the distinction between the terms ''religion'' and ''spirituality'' in research and clinical practice. It reviews research on religion and mental health, as well as extensive research literature on the mind-body relationship, and develops a model to explain how religious involvement may impact physical health through the mind-body mechanisms.

Health Care as a Social Good: Religious Values and the American Democracy argues that as escalating costs absorb a greater percentage of family income and government budgets, it is through the implementation of religious values that Americans can create a more community-based system. Transformation of the US health care system is a national priority and Americans need to work together now to bypass our differences. Craig insists that instilling core values will help us achieve this transformation, creating a new and better system that reflects the ideals of American democracy and the common good.

While spirituality has been generally recognized as an essential dimension of palliative care, uniformity of spiritual care practice has been lacking across health care settings due to factors like varying understandings and definitions of spirituality, lack of resources and practical tools, and limited professional education and training in spiritual care. This important new resource provides much-needed definitions and charts a common language for addressing spiritual care across the disciplines of medicine, nursing, social work, chaplaincy, psychology, and other groups. It presents models of spiritual care that are broad and inclusive, and provides tools for screening, assessment, care planning, and interventions.

Spirituality in Healthcare is an authoritative reference on the subject providing unequalled coverage, critical depth and an integrated source of key topics. Divided into six sections including practice, research, policy and training, the book brings together international contributions from scholars in the field to provide a unique and stimulating resource.

A haunting tale of human resilience and hope in the face of unrelieved horror, Albert Camus' iconic novel about an epidemic ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature. Originally published in 1947, The Plague is in part an allegory of France's suffering under the Nazi occupation, and a timeless story of bravery and determination against the precariousness of human existence.

This volume provides a comprehensive evaluation of the relationship between spirituality, religion, and medicine evaluating current empirical research and academic scholarship. Written by leading clinician researchers in their fields, contributors provide case examples and highlight best practices when engaging religion/spirituality within clinical practice. This is the first collection that assesses how the medical context interacts with patient spirituality recognizing crucial differences between contexts from obstetrics and family medicine, to nursing, to gerontology and the ICU.

Drawing on data from Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians, Candy Gunther Brown Brown reverses a number of stereotypes about believers in faith-healing. Among them is the idea that poorer, less educated people are more likely to believe in the healing power of prayer and therefore less likely to see doctors. Brown finds instead that people across socioeconomic backgrounds use prayer alongside conventional medicine rather than as a substitute. Dissecting medical records from before and after prayer, surveys of prayer recipients, prospective clinical trials, and multiyear follow-up observations and interviews, she shows that the widespread perception of prayer's healing power has demonstrable social effects, and that in some cases those effects produce improvements in health that can be scientifically verified.

Elizabeth Johnston Taylor provides a practical workbook with guidelines for detecting, understanding, and responding to the spiritual needs embedded in patients' conversations. The lessons, tips, and exercises integrate psychology, psychiatry, pastoral counseling, nursing, chaplaincy, and spiritual direction for whole-person care. [Currently unavailable through IU Libraries]

This book discusses contemporary issues in medical ethics from a Buddhist perspective. Drawing on ancient and modern sources, Damien Keown shows how Buddhist ethical principles can be applied consistently to a range of bioethical problems, including abortion, embryo research, and euthanasia.

Over the centuries, Buddhist ideas have influenced medical thought and practice in complex and varied ways in diverse regions and cultures. A companion to Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources, this work presents a collection of modern and contemporary texts and conversations from across the Buddhist world dealing with the multifaceted relationship between Buddhism and medicine.

Written by a physician and a chaplain, this book presents a simple, universal model of spirituality that is independent of religion, and shows how the clinician can apply the model to help in the management of chronic illness.

This is a comprehensive account of the psychology of death and bereavement, which places the subject within the contexts of the major world religions and their associated mourning and funeral customs.

This volume reviews and integrates the growing body of contemporary psychological research on the links between religious faith and health outcomes. It presents findings from empirical studies of populations ranging from healthy individuals to those with specific clinical problems, including cancer, HIV/AIDS, and psychological disorders, and examines such critical questions as the impact of religious practices on health behaviors and health risks; the role played by faith in adaptation to illness or disability; and possible influences on physiological functioning and mortality.

Drawing heavily on stories of ill and dying children to illustrate and clarify his discussion of theological-philosophical issues, Hauerwas explores why we so fervently seek explanations for suffering and evil, and he shows how modern medicine has become a god to which we look for deliverance from the evils of disease and mortality.

A deep appreciation for the diversity of human spirituality informs this volume, which examines over two dozen religious traditions in the context of clinical practice. Knowledge of religious diversity, now considered part of multicultural competency in the mental health professions, is particularly crucial when the client's faith differs from one's own.

This book describes how religious beliefs and practices relate to mental health and influence mental health care. It presents research on the association between religion and personality, coping behavior, anxiety, depression, psychoses, and successes in psychotherapy and includes discussions on specific religions and their perspectives on mental health.

Explicitly dealing with the religious aspects of healing and healers, this unique and intriguing book examines illness, healing, and religion in cross-cultural perspective by looking at how sickness is understood and treated in a wide variety of cultures.

This book presents a critical analysis of the debate in Muslim countries at the religious, legal and political level, sparked by the introduction of new biomedical technologies such as cloning, genetics, organ transplants and in vitro fertilization. The book draws on law, sociology, anthropology, politics and the history of science.

This book investigates configurations of the entanglement between medicine, religion, and spirituality in Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa. How do political and legal conditions affect these healing systems? How do they relate to religious and scientific discourses? How do therapeutic practitioners position themselves between medicine and religion, and what is their appeal for patients?

This pathbreaking work by two leading medical researchers explores the neurophysiology of religious experience. Building on an explanation of the basic structure of the brain, the authors focus on parts most relevant to human experience, emotion, and cognition. On this basis, they plot how the brain is involved in mystical experiences. Successive chapters apply this scheme to mythmaking, ritual and liturgy, meditation, near-death experiences, and theology itself.

Laying the groundwork for a new synthesis of scientific and theological dialogue, this book proposes that neurotheology, a term fraught with potential problems, is a highly useful and important voice in the greater study of religious and theological ideas and their intersection with science.

Spirituality, Health, and Wholeness: An Introductory Guide for Health Care Professionals explores the principles of spiritual care as applied to clinical practice. This book focuses specifically on the significance of spirituality in clinical settings with practical suggestions on how to apply these principles in the healing process.

This book provides an overview of the research on spirituality, religiousness and health, including the most important studies, conceptualization, instruments for measurement, types of studies, challenges, and criticisms. It covers essential information on the influence of spirituality and religiousness in mental and physical health, and provides guidance for its use in clinical practice.

Spirituality and Health: Multidisciplinary Explorations examines the relationship between health/well-being and spirituality. Chaplains and pastoral counselors offer evidence-based research on the importance of spirituality in holistic health care, and practitioners in the fields of occupational therapy, clinical psychology, nursing, and oncology share how spirituality enters into their healing practices.

In this, the third edition, Harold G. Koenig, M.D. addresses the whys, hows, whens, and whats of patient-centered integration of spirituality into patient care so that health professionals, including physicians in primary care and the medical and surgical specialties, can utilize this information in clinical practice. Whole chapters are also included offering profession-specific information for nurses, clergy, mental health professionals, social workers, and occupational and physical therapists.

Efforts to evaluate the clinical encounter in terms of autonomous agents governed by rationally justified moral principles continue to be criticized. These essays, written by physicians, ethicists, theologians and philosophers, examine various models of the clinical encounter emerging out of these criticisms and explore the prospects they offer for theological and religious discourse.