Journal of Religion & Health最新文献

This study examines how adults in Colombia employed religious and other psychological coping strategies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a specific focus on the role of faith-based practices in shaping adaptive responses. Drawing on Lazarus and Folkman's transactional model of stress and coping and grounded in the Colombian context where religion holds strong cultural significance, we analyzed data from 5,559 participants using a psychometrically validated coping strategies scale with an approximate response rate around 62.1%. While the validation process ensured the reliability of the instrument, our focus was to explore how coping strategies clustered into distinct psychosocial profiles, how these profiles varied across sociodemographic subgroups, and how religious coping was integrated within each configuration. Cluster analysis identified four coping profiles, two of which featured strong religious engagement. Multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis confirmed measurement invariance across groups, supporting valid comparisons. The findings reveal that religious coping co-occurred to varying degrees with other strategies, such as problem-solving, emotional avoidance, and social or professional support, based on latent inter-factor correlations from an oblique confirmatory factor analysis. These results highlight the culturally embedded nature of faith in collective coping and contribute to the literature on religious resilience during large-scale public health crises.

Dementia, particularly in its late stages, challenges dominant paradigms of personhood, identity, and ethical care. While most studies focus on clinical and pharmacological interventions, this paper moves beyond symptom management by integrating Viktor Frankl's logotherapy and Simone Weil's ethics of attention. This proposes an integrated framework for dementia care centered on meaning-making, relational presence, and affirming personhood. Drawing on Frankl's will to meaning and the capacity for self-transcendence, and Weil's discipline of attentive presence, this paper demonstrates that individuals with dementia retain the capacity for meaning and connection even as cognitive abilities decline. Lived experiences and the perspectives of caregivers and professionals reveal meaning-making as a dynamic, embodied, and relational process. This integrated approach advocates for adaptable and responsive care. Within this framework, meaning is co-created in the present moment, and human dignity is upheld through presence and ethical attention. By reframing dementia care to prioritize existential and relational dimensions, this study calls for systemic training and policy reforms to create caring environments, offering a more compassionate and hopeful vision for individuals living with dementia and their caregivers.

This study explores the lived experiences of spouses of altruistic kidney donors in faith-based communities in Israel. While not undergoing the surgical procedure themselves, spouses are deeply involved in the donation process, emotionally, relationally, and spiritually, yet their perspectives remain largely overlooked within healthcare systems and religious discourse. Drawing on interpretive phenomenological analysis and informed by an ecological framework, this study examines how individual, relational, communal, and institutional contexts shape spouses' experiences of donation. Findings indicate that spouses often assume extensive emotional and practical responsibilities while navigating complex moral tensions related to consent, faith, responsibility, and communal expectations. Although many expressed pride in their partners' altruistic acts, participants also described feelings of invisibility, emotional burden, and limited institutional recognition of their supportive role. These experiences reveal how altruistic donation, often framed as an individual moral act, is in practice embedded within intimate relationships and sustained through relational labor that remains largely unacknowledged. By foregrounding the voices of donors' partners, this study contributes to a more relational and ethically nuanced understanding of altruism in faith-based contexts. It highlights the need for greater institutional and pastoral awareness of spouses' experiences and calls for more inclusive approaches to care, support, and ethical engagement within religiously grounded medical practices.

This issue of JORH considers various systematic literature reviews and bibliometric analyses covering a diverse field of religion and health topics-reviews which can save a considerable amount of time for those involved in research, clinical or ethical decision-making. The second theme in this issue relates to healthcare research conducted in Israel, plus the broader international concern of antisemitism-which, despite the skeptics, continues to escalate around the world. The final theme covered in this issue considers the increasing development, validation and/or adaptation of scales for the measurement of religiosity, spirituality and healthcare practices.

The University of Deusto, a Jesuit institution with a long educational tradition, bases its pedagogical model on Ignatian Pedagogy, promoting the comprehensive education of students. Within this framework, transversal learning outcomes occupy a central place, with the hallmark skill being that which develops self-knowledge, ethics, social responsibility, sustainability, and openness to transcendence. This approach seeks to train students who are committed to society and capable of acting with professional excellence and a sense of social justice. In this context, the Faculty of Health Sciences was created in 2020 with the mission of training professionals in Medicine, Nursing, Physiotherapy, and Psychology who not only master technical skills but also essential transversal learning outcomes. To achieve this, priority is given to the application of active learning methodologies such as Problem-Based Learning (PBL), Clinical Scenario-Based Learning (CSBL), and simulation, all of which are aligned with Ignatian Pedagogy. To support this teaching innovation, the Commission on Learning Methodologies in Health Sciences (CoMACS, from the Spanish) was established as a natural evolution of the Medical and Health Education Unit. Its objective is to coordinate the implementation of these methodologies, train faculty, and ensure educational quality. Its achievements include the full implementation of PBL in the Bachelor's Degree in Medicine, the consolidation of CSBL in the Bachelor's Degree in Nursing, and the development of simulation programs. This model has strengthened teaching innovation and educational excellence, positioning itself as a benchmark at the University of Deusto.

Healthcare decisions at the beginning and end of life pose enduring moral challenges that are increasingly intensified by the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into clinical practice. This article examines these challenges through a moral-theological understanding of conscience, emphasizing human dignity, moral agency, and responsibility. Drawing primarily from Catholic moral theology, I examine how AI-driven tools in prenatal screening, reproductive technologies, end-of-life care, and prognostic decision-making can influence, constrain, or supplant conscientious judgment among healthcare professionals and patients. While AI offers significant benefits in efficiency and accuracy, it also risks fostering moral distancing, automation bias, and reducing ethical discernment to algorithmic outputs. I argue that conscience must remain a critically formed and relational capacity rather than a function delegated to technology. The article proposes a theologically grounded framework for integrating AI into healthcare that preserves moral discernment, safeguards vulnerable human life, and promotes ethically humane care.

While much sociological literature interprets contemporary pilgrimage through fragmentation, commodification, and post-secular hybridity, this study argues that pilgrimage continues to function as a process of spiritual healing and reintegration-a space where transcendence and everyday life are dynamically reconciled. Drawing on Bauman's typology of late-modern identities-the Player, the Tourist, the Vagabond, and the Stroller-reinterpreted through the Deming cycle (Plan-Do-Study-Act) and the Thomistic framework of the cardinal virtues, the article proposes pilgrimage as a therapeutic pathway toward moral, relational, and existential wholeness. Based on qualitative fieldwork in Medjugorje (Bosnia and Herzegovina), including interviews with pilgrims (n = 20) and local residents (n = 11), one focus group, and comparative ethnographic observations in Čapljina as a control setting, the analysis shows how devotional and communal practices-hospitality, confession, fasting, and prayer-generate spiritual resilience and psychosocial wellbeing. Both pilgrims and hosts engage in practices that restore coherence and belonging amid social fragmentation, revealing pilgrimage as more than religious tourism: a lived process of healing the self and community. Integrating Bauman's typology with virtue ethics allows the four postmodern figures to be read as successive stages in a restorative cycle culminating in the Integrated Pilgrim-a person whose search for meaning unites action, contemplation, and ethical transformation. This framework situates pilgrimage within the discourse on religion and health, showing that sacred travel fosters a therapeutic completeness (beatitudo imperfecta) transcending consumerist and secular models of wellbeing.

This article considers whether the trauma syndrome moral injury, as developed within the military context, is applicable to elite sport and to sport's wellbeing and integrity discourse. In the face of mounting wellbeing and integrity problems faced within elite sport, the literature examining the wellbeing and integrity of sport, is calling for a multidisciplinary response that considers the moral and ethical frameworks within elite sports' institutions. Moral injury presents as such a response. Examined is the growing use of moral injury in the civilian context and specifically amongst healthcare workers. Drawing together this work, moral injury is posited as applicable to elite sport though contextually contingent. As has been summarised within the military context for potentially morally injurious events, there is often the taking of life, whereas in the medical context it is in the failure to save life. This article argues that in elite sport the context for potentially morally injurious events is in the failure of the quest, where the quest is the elite athlete's socially constructed ultimate existential purpose. Its traumatic loss can cause the shattering of identity and teleological meaning, and the loss of trust in self and others.

Blood has long held a central place in both religious symbolism and medical practice, carrying meanings that range from life, purity, and covenant to danger, impurity, and death. This article examines the historical relationship between blood, medicine, and Christian thought, focusing especially on how Christian traditions interpreted the emergence of blood transfusion. The study adopts a historical narrative approach, analyzing primary and secondary sources from Europe and North America. After outlining the theological meanings of blood-covenant, sacrifice, redemption, purity, and danger-the article traces key milestones in the scientific development of transfusion from early modern legends to twentieth-century advances. Particular attention is given to the ways in which various Christian denominations responded to transfusion as it entered clinical practice. While Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Reformed, and Methodist communities gradually embraced transfusion as a legitimate therapeutic act aligned with principles of charity and the preservation of life, other groups, most notably Jehovah's Witnesses, adopted a restrictive interpretation of biblical texts that led to the rejection of transfusion and generated significant ethical and legal debates. By integrating medical history with theological perspectives, this article demonstrates that the reception of transfusion within Christian cultures was shaped not only by scientific progress but also by enduring religious understandings of blood as a symbol of life, redemption, and moral responsibility.

The social work profession-the largest provider of mental health services in the USA-has witnessed a growing interest in spirituality. To map the scientific landscape in this emerging area, a bibliometric analysis was conducted. Study data consisted of 921 refereed articles indexed in Scopus and the Web of Science, which were analyzed using the Bibliometrix R-package. The results reveal a relatively steady increase, starting in the 1980s, in the annual dissemination of articles focusing on spirituality. Most authors are located in the USA, with Canda, Hodge, Oxhandler, and Sheridan making notable contributions. The spirituality literature features a broad array of topics that intersect with most areas of social work practice. The results offer guidance to researchers, educators, and students interested in the intersection of spirituality and social work. These findings underscore the growing recognition of spirituality as a vital component of holistic social work practice. For instance, researchers might draw on the study's analytical outputs-including keyword co-occurrence networks, trend topic analyses, thematic maps, and thematic evolution pathways-to identify emerging topics, trace conceptual shifts, and guide future lines of inquiry.