VanderWeele: A Course on Religion and Public Health at Harvard

Research has gradually accumulated suggesting that religious participation is a powerful social determinant of health.The role of religion in shaping health is given relatively little attention in most public health curricula today. When religion is discussed, it is often in the context of being an impediment to public health progress. However, the research, which has become increasingly rigorous, suggests that religious participation in general, and religious service attendance in particular, is a powerful health resource affecting outcomes ranging from longevity and depression to cancer survival and suicide. To neglect it in discussions of public health and social determinants of health is to miss an important aspect of life that appears to confer substantial health to large portions of the world’s population.

Courses on religion and health are slowly beginning to emerge in public health curricula. Here we briefly describe a course that the first author has taught at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. We also discuss potential lessons for public health from the rapid incorporation of courses on spiri- tuality and health within medical school curricula over the past two decades. 

 

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health_and_religion_course_harvard_.pdf697 KB