Abstract
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.
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Notes
This discussion draws on Jan Froestad, “Health, Democracy and Governance in South Africa: Two Case Studies,” unpublished paper (Bergen: University of Bergen, 2002); and
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By self-referential politics, we mean here that kind of discourse, oriented toward coordinated action and in principle open to all, where citizens may state their validity claims and have them tested in argument, properly free of the instrumental demands of business or bureaucracy, state or market; see Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001).
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For a particularly relevant discussion in the context of religion and health, see Steve de Gruchy, “Of Agency, Assets and Appreciation: Seeking Some Commonalities between Theology and Development,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 117 (2003): 20–39.
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Notable in this regard is the highly popular work by Richard Dawkins, though his analysis shows little of the intellectual attention to counterfactual information one would expect from someone who explicitly appeals to rigorous science; see Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
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A potent illustration of this widely recognized dynamic may be found, in the context of how art is produced, in John Berger, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1972).
Paul Farmer, for example, has explicitly acknowledged his debt as a clinician to the religious notion of the “preferential option for the poor”; see Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).
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See, for example, the important study by Steffen Fleßa, Gesundheitsreformen in Entwicklungsländern: Eine kritische Analyse aus Sicht der kirchlichen Entwicklungshilfe (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck, 2002).
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What one means by compassion and love is a key question, and the researchers involved spent much time exploring that in terms of affective and material dimensions of health. Our interest here is primarily to indicate the importance of perceptions for behavior and action; see, for example, Benn, “The Influence of Cultural and Religious Frameworks”; George Lakoff and with Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999); George Lakoff and — Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003 (1980)); Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor; R. Jones, “Cognitive Frames and Cultural Responses to Aids Education” (paper presented at the 12th International Conference on AIDS, Geneva, 1998).
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For a profound study of such intermediary organizations, see Thomas F. Carroll, Intermediary NGOs: The Supporting Link in Grassroots Development, Library of Management for Development (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian Press, 1992).
Nancy Tatom Ammerman, with et al., Congregation and Community (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 349.
The dangers of exclusion-a potential threat to the well-being of others-are well expressed by Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, Cultural Memory in the Present (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1998), 1–78.
For a philosophical grounding to this distinction, particularly in the idea of a threefold difference in mimesis between a prefigured, a configured, and a reconfigured narrative construction of world, see Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 3, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
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© 2012 Gary R. Gunderson and James R. Cochrane
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Gunderson, G.R., Cochrane, J.R. (2012). Religious Health Assets: What Religion Brings to Health of the Public. In: Religion and the Health of the Public. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015259_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137015259_3
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