Gary R. Gunderson

The Challenge of Systems

The paradigm we have outlined for understanding religion and the health of the public rests partly on the credibility of each component idea, and partly on how those components as a whole serve the work of better reflection and action. Here we reflect on one last critical component, the link between the health of the public on one hand, and polity and economy on the other. This link seems obvious, as farming is to weather and climate. However, no aspect is as challenging or contested, and we tread warily in this respect. Faith, health, politics, and economics: each is an aspect of human life that might be designed to rule the others, each has appeared to do so in different times and places, and each is complex beyond measure.

The Health of the Public and the Religious Mind: Connections and Disconnections

The history of religion can barely be separated from that of health. Most, if not all, religions are bound up with some comprehensive conception of health and well-being, whether cast in cyclical or linear patterns of redemption, salvation, or fullness of life. Health, here, means more than medicine.1 However, even the term “medicine” has a deeper meaning than most realize, with surprising etymological origins in the pharaonic language of Egypt: the mediation (medi) of the healer (sine).2

People Who Congregate: Building on Strengths

Public health professionals are often surprised at how ubiquitously and actively congregations already engage in work relevant to the health of communities. Congregational leaders are equally as often surprised to learn how much of what they “naturally” do is relevant to the health of the public. As their activity in caring for individuals is so common, reflecting deeply held historical norms, they do not think of their work as advancing or sustaining community systems of health that they can deliberately improve.

Boundary Leadership: Embodying Complexity in Turbulence

Mowbray, an otherwise innocuous suburb of Cape Town, is a transport hub, a place of transition. Here all sorts of workers, mostly from distant townships, are on their way into or out of the city, getting off the train and onto a bus as they travel. Here, food and goods are sold on the sidewalk, crowds pushing this way and that under the careful and constant eye of police, commerce and conflict amid the noise, and replete with smells and energy of a thriving society.

Leading Causes of Life: Pathology in Its Place

In the US Civil War the battle of Shiloh, remarkable for its raw violence, the ignorance of its generals, and the age of its soldiers, turned the Tennessee River east of Memphis red with young blood. One general, leading a ten thousand strong Union division, took two days to find the road leading to the main battlefield, though the sound of distant gunfire was always present. Thick underbrush and the gentle roll of the terrain meant that thousands of men, many teenagers, lost their lives, dying without ever seeing their enemy. Most soldiers perished from lack of water or inadequate treatment of relatively minor wounds in desperate camps a few dozen miles removed from the battlefield while their generals dithered about what to do next. Others lived to fight again, but hundreds simply chose to walk away and keep walking, refusing to be party to such deadly meaninglessness.

Seeking Health: Persons, Bodies, and Choices

For three years, he came to the family home every week to mow, rake, and maintain the garden for which two professionals had little time. Leonard,2 a young Xhosa man, itinerant, uncomfortable speaking English, living in a shack with his brother, and unable to find full time employment, lived precariously. Yet honorable, trustworthy, diligent, and always friendly—even if cannily—he was easy to deal with.

Religion and the Health of the Public: Deep Accountability

Better theory enables better practice, or it is not worth the bother. If a theory does not help those in positions of influence to guide efforts and alignments relevant to the health of their community, it is little better than intellectual entertainment, a distraction. Good theory helps people in positions of influence, many of whom might not think of themselves as “leaders,” to achieve deep accountability for how they use their influence and live their lives. They seek accountability that is deep-rooted in an understanding of the complexity of life and in respect for its forms, aware of the turbulence it contains, sensitive to the variety of levels and scales at which human relationships matter, and worthy of the weight their decisions must support over time. We have defined health as comprehensive well-being, and linked it to freedom via Amartya Sen’s theory of development, and to justice by calling on Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of ethics as rooted in an understanding of the self as constituted by another. Deep accountability for health takes account of all three dimensions of human life.

Seeing Differently: Changing the Paradigm of the Health of the Public

At one level, this book is about the relationship between public health and religion. It is a relationship with deep historical roots that remain much closer to our time than what current intellectual formation and disciplinary training in either public health or religious leadership fully grasps. Reconnecting the two is more important than one might think. One of our major undertakings here, then, is to argue for that reconnection—for the sake of public health and for the best in religious traditions.

Religious Health Assets: What Religion Brings to Health of the Public

An integrative paradigm for religion in the health of the public begins in our thinking with the idea of religious health assets (RHAs). This gives the name to the work over the last several years of the international collaborative we helped found, the African Religious Health Assets Programme (ARHAP). Wherever we encountered others, the first puzzle, quite understandably, was what we meant by “RHAs” and why we were using this term. Explaining this, and laying the foundation for the interconnected ideas that follow, is our task here.