Sorajjakool Siroj - World Religions for Healthcare Professionals

Teaching and publishing on the topic of world religions is not for the faint of heart. It takes courage and a bit of careless abandonment. Take, for instance, the idea that one can describe Hinduism in a single chapter a religion that spans thousands of years, billions of adherents, and multiple continents, languages, and people groups. The same can be said for Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, and so on.

Add to this the complexity of specific elements of each of these religions that have special relevance for healthcare. This effort is multifaceted. First, we seek to identify issues emerging from an authentic, lived-out, faith-based perspective on life and health. In other words, our aim is to convey information from within the religious context. Second, we must write and offer this work for the reader. Readers have specific needs practical, educational needs that our authors must address. Third, when considering health beliefs and practices, it is difficult to make a clear distinction between faith and cultural practice.

Despite these challenges, we enthusiastically offer the text that follows. We are excited about it in part because we teach it and live it out in practice in the places we live and work. Most of the authors are, in fact, involved daily in teaching and/or practice that is focused on religion and healthcare. Faith-based healthcare institutions, both educational and service-oriented facilities, are hard pressed to thrive in the current context in North America. In a highly competitive and intensely difficult financial context, there remain people committed to offering healthcare from a faith-based perspective.

Regardless of the context from which you offer healthcare, providers must also be purposeful in this day and age to attend to matters of religion. The religious diversity that healthcare providers face in the lives of their patients is unprecedented in world history. North America is the most religiously diverse culture ever to appear and our healthcare providers must deal with this fact routinely.

We have assiduously approached this project from a non-partisan perspective. In other words, we are not offering this book for North American Christians to learn more about non-Christians they may face as clients and patients. Anyone who works in healthcare knows that as many, if not more, of the healthcare providers in North America are non-Christians. We do not need a book of the sort that looks toward the Other from a Christian or any one privileged perspective to see what they believe and who they are. The Hindu psychologist needs to know about Latter-day Saints as much as Catholic nurses need to know about Buddhists. The Muslim surgeon needs to know about Jehovahs Witness beliefs as much as the Sikh pharmacist needs to know about her Jewish patient. The Shia public health official needs to know more about the Sunni family who lives just down the street.

We find these inter-religious conversations to be incredibly energizing and useful. Useful to a society that celebrates its diversity. Useful to a community that purposefully seeks points of commonality while respecting points of difference. We hope that you will also.

There is very little storytelling in this volume, with the one notable exception of the chapter on American Indians. Although storytelling is integral to all religion, we made an exception in our format for the chapter on American Indians. The stories that will keep this volume alive in the minds of our readers, however, are those that you will share with your colleagues, friends, and families about what you have learned by reading; about what happened at work with this or that religious person or family or nurse or doctor. With our first edition, weeks prior to our deadline, we learned of a traditional Islamic practice of shaving the head of a newborn baby. As we finalized content for this edition, we are once again struck by a novel case of old believers from Russia here in America for three generations. Their death and burial rituals demanded they simply take their loved ones body from the ICU to their vehicle for transport home.