Religious Communities
Religious Communities and Human Flourishing
In the project on Religious Communities and Human Flourishing, we aim to carry out original empirical research on how religious communities affect various aspects of flourishing including health, happiness, meaning and purpose, and close social relationships.
We also aim to summarize the most rigorous research in this area of religious communities and human flourishing outcomes and to relate it to traditions within theology and philosophy. A central component of the review and summary of empirical research is evaluating the strength of the evidence in what is a very large literature. Although numerous studies have suggested that participation in religious communities has a beneficial association with a variety of health outcomes, much of the empirical research relating religious participation to health outcomes is problematic because of the issue of "reverse causation" - the possibility that attending religious services might be associated with health only because it is only those who are healthy who can attend.
Rigorous designs with longitudinal data over time are necessary to control for this possibility and our own empirical research and also our research synthesis summary has restricted attention to those studies with such rigorous designs.
Spirituality and Religion in Medicine and Public Health
In the project on Religion in Medicine and Public Health, we aim to carry out research and reflection on how religious concerns, viewpoints, and communities can best be integrated with medicine and public health. This ranges from how religion and spirituality and clergy involvement might inform medical decision-making, patient care, and public health practice to how public health institutions, religious communities, and faith-based organization can partner together to promote health and well-being.
Theology of Health
The Theology of Health project aims to make contributions towards developing a theology concerning the concept of health. Considerable attention has been given to the theology of health care provision, but the theology of health itself - what health is, how it is to be understood, how it relates to theological understandings of the human person - is much less well developed. The third aim of the project is to help fill this gap in the literature.
