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Over the past two decades, researchers have successfully accumulated lots of data pointing to a salutary impact of religious involvement. But progress in the religion and health field has been inhibited by the relative lack of attention to important conceptual and theoretical issues. This paper asserts that until we focus as much on the latter as on the former, this field will remain marginalized and thus ineffective in contributing to understandings of the determinants of health and healing. Careful attention to the how and why of a religion–health connection is imperative for bringing this research into the mainstream of biomedicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of the extent of the interconnection, if any, between religion and the Western culture of biomedicine has received considerable scholarly attention over the past several decades. However, any phenomenological analysis that begins by positing an essence of religion is, if not doomed, deeply flawed from the outset. This paper employs William Alston’s non-essentialist notion of ‘religion-making characteristics’ to assess the extent of the interconnection. The conclusion is that the culture of biomedicine does share many, if not all of these characteristics, and that both religion and medicine overlap in significant ways on, to use Erwin Goodenough’s metaphor, the painted curtain that separates man from the tremendum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]