Table of Contents

Introduction: critical approaches to the entanglement of religion, medicine, and healing Part I. Healing practices with religious roots and frames 1. Afro-Atlantic healing practices 2. Ayurveda: the modern faces of ‘Vedic’ healing and sacred science 3. Curanderismo in the Americas 4. Healing traditions in sub-Saharan Africa 5. Homeopathy and chiropractic in the United States and beyond 6. ‘Mind Cure’ and mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) 7. The hospice movement, palliative care, and Anthroposophy in Europe 8. Spiritual healing in Latin America 9. Traditional Chinese medicine: history, ethnography, and practice 10. Unani medicine: health, religion, and politics in colonial India Part II. Religious actors in and around the medical field 11. Diagnosing materialism: Ayurvedic purification regimens as spiritual cure 12. Buddhist spiritual caregivers in Japan 13. Chaplains and spiritual caregivers in American healthcare organizations 14. Muslim healthcare chaplaincy in North America and Europe: professionalizing a communal obligation 15. Charismatic healers: embodied practices in US and Singaporean megachurches 16. Energy healing: Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, and Healing Touch in the United States and beyond 17. Gurus and healing: Amma (Mata Amritanandamyi) at the intersection of miracles and medicine 18. Medical missionaries and witch doctors: Protestant object lessons in biomedicine in Africa and the South Pacific 19. Rabbinic authority and reproductive medicine in Israel PART III. Organizing infrastructures of religion and medicine: pluralism and competition 20. Digital tools for fertility awareness: family planning, health, religion, and feminine embodiment 21. The Internet as infrastructure for healing: the case of spirit possession in Japan 22. Markets of medicine: orthodox medicine, complementary and alternative medicine, and religion in Britain 23. Medical pluralism in policy and practice: the case of Malaysia 24. Midwifery and traditional birth attendants in transnational perspective 25. Postcolonial medicine in African contexts 26. Religious entrepreneurs in the health market: opportunities in a field dominated by biomedicine Part IV. Boundary-making between religion and medicine 27. Policing the boundaries of medical science: causality, evidence, and the question of religion 28. Competing religious and biomedical notions of treatment: the case of blood transfusion refusals 29. Ayurveda (re-)invented: engagements with science and religion in colonial India 30. Nurses on the frontline of secular and religious knowledges 31. Religion, culture, and the politics of vaccine hesitancy: perspectives of parents, pundits, and physicians 32. The World Health Organization’s production and enactment of spirituality 33. Contemporary psychiatry and psychotherapy’s engagements with religion/spirituality in Europe and North America Part V. Religion and epidemics 34. Religion, ‘the Chinese virus,’ and perceptions of Asian Americans as a moral and medical menace 35. Defying responsibility: modes of silence, religious symbolism, and biopolitics in the COVID-19 pandemic 36. Christianity and the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States 37. The impact of COVID-19 on religion in Japan 38. A cultural map of the pandemic