As America’s religious landscape rapidly diversifies, health professionals and leaders increasingly recognize religion as a key social determinant of health, a factor highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet academic training in the health fields only occasionally addresses this dimension of human wellbeing at any depth. This project will solidify broad understanding of the positive potential of our nation’s growing religious and spiritual diversity (including “nones”) to strengthen health outcomes for all.
Tapping Interfaith America’s (IA’s) network of more than 250 faith and health educators, this project will foster interfaith competencies in health fields programs, strengthen campus-community partnerships, and deepen academic and public understanding about religion as a social determinant of health. Academic partners from a range of disciplines and programs (including nursing, pre-med, public health, religious studies, sociology, and others) will develop courses and curricula, conduct research, advance community partnerships, and join a growing network of those engaging religious diversity as a vital factor in human wellbeing.
IA brings to this project more than a decade’s work on 1,100-plus campuses, where we have collaborated with educators to implement curricular and co-curricular interfaith learning designed to equip the next generation of civic leaders with the capacity to live and work productively across religious and worldview difference. This project targets the health landscape as a civic space ripe for the cultivation of thoughtful interfaith engagement. Through IA’s methodology of grants, skill- and network-building, resource sharing, and convenings, this project will scale efforts to integrate religious and spiritual factors in health-related education, foster campus-community partnerships, and, ultimately, bridge the existing religion-science divide in ways that foster the flourishing of care seekers and health professionals alike.
