Religions and the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Global Health Crisis as Shifts Catalyser in Religious Imagination and Practices

Abstract

This paper draws upon the author’s own research and the two special issues in the two academic religious studies journals he himself edited. In addition, the paper gives an overview of many other publications that appeared in the recent years as an attempt to analyse the reactions of various religions to the Covid-19 pandemic and the respective shifts in religious practices the pandemic triggered or accelerated. The author singles out a few major themes that stood out prominently in the experiences of thereligious communities during the pandemic: theological interpretations of the health crisis; shifts in corporate rituals; an explosive growth of the virtual forms of worship; a reconfiguring of authority structures; preserving specific religious identity, etc