Practical and Prophetic Caregiving: A Mosque, A Church, and the Suffering of Black Bodies
Lance Laird, ThD, Boston University School of Medicine
Scholars of religion, spirituality and health tend to locate all three within individual bodies, rather than in religious communities where individual spirituality is most often practiced. When public health officials approach faith-based communities (social bodies), they have a tendency to view them as “information delivery sites” for dissemination of health education materials. Religion scholars have a tendency to focus on theologies, rituals, or the official programs of churches, synagogues, and mosques. But what can a close study of the religious lives of individuals within congregations tell us about how faith communities practically connect religion and health?
Medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman has challenged the medical community to restore “caregiving” to the center of professional practice and training. He suggests that informal caregiving that takes place in families, where the majority of health “care” takes place, is both the “ground of moral life” and also the most under-resourced sector of the healthcare “system.” For Kleinman and others, the term “social suffering” denotes both the suffering produced in bodies by social, economic and political structures; and the socially shared nature of suffering within intimate circles. How might these concepts help us understand the connections between religious communities and health?
Based on over a year of ethnographic participant observation in two congregations—one mosque and one church in one neighborhood, we examine how these social bodies care for individual bodies in an intersecting local moral world. Both congregations are predominantly Black, though the term Black masks many shades of color, identity, and experience. In individual interviews and an interfaith workshop, we asked people how they define healthy people, healthy congregations, and healthy neighborhoods; how the congregation supports that health; and what the biggest obstacles to health are.
These two congregations sit at two major intersections at either end of a long city street that outsiders characterize as “plagued” by poverty and violent crime. In the workshop, mosque and church members discussed their neighborhood, they listed several health threats: media, violence, negative values, substance abuse, socio-economic issues, and a toxic environment. Individuals told us that they, their families and friends in the congregation struggle with mental health and addiction issues, moral and relational problems, discrimination, poor access to services, and unemployment. Adults prayed for the safety of children on the streets and bemoaned the lack of respect and values that lead youth to commit acts of violence.
While sermons and stories in the respective congregations may hint at different theological and moral frameworks for linking health and faith, our focus in this paper will be on how Christian and Muslim religious bodies “give care” for individual bodies weakened by illness, and simultaneously offer prophetic protest against forces that make some bodies more vulnerable to dis-ease than others. Religions, spiritualities and health are concretely connected in the social body of the congregation and thence to the larger society by a dissenting moral vision of health that transcends that body.
Scholars of religion, spirituality and health tend to locate all three within individual bodies, rather than in religious communities where individual spirituality is most often practiced. When public health officials approach faith-based communities (social bodies), they have a tendency to view them as “information delivery sites” for dissemination of health education materials. Religion scholars have a tendency to focus on theologies, rituals, or the official programs of churches, synagogues, and mosques. But what can a close study of the religious lives of individuals within congregations tell us about how faith communities practically connect religion and health?
Medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman has challenged the medical community to restore “caregiving” to the center of professional practice and training. He suggests that informal caregiving that takes place in families, where the majority of health “care” takes place, is both the “ground of moral life” and also the most under-resourced sector of the healthcare “system.” For Kleinman and others, the term “social suffering” denotes both the suffering produced in bodies by social, economic and political structures; and the socially shared nature of suffering within intimate circles. How might these concepts help us understand the connections between religious communities and health?
Based on over a year of ethnographic participant observation in two congregations—one mosque and one church in one neighborhood, we examine how these social bodies care for individual bodies in an intersecting local moral world. Both congregations are predominantly Black, though the term Black masks many shades of color, identity, and experience. In individual interviews and an interfaith workshop, we asked people how they define healthy people, healthy congregations, and healthy neighborhoods; how the congregation supports that health; and what the biggest obstacles to health are.
These two congregations sit at two major intersections at either end of a long city street that outsiders characterize as “plagued” by poverty and violent crime. In the workshop, mosque and church members discussed their neighborhood, they listed several health threats: media, violence, negative values, substance abuse, socio-economic issues, and a toxic environment. Individuals told us that they, their families and friends in the congregation struggle with mental health and addiction issues, moral and relational problems, discrimination, poor access to services, and unemployment. Adults prayed for the safety of children on the streets and bemoaned the lack of respect and values that lead youth to commit acts of violence.
While sermons and stories in the respective congregations may hint at different theological and moral frameworks for linking health and faith, our focus in this paper will be on how Christian and Muslim religious bodies “give care” for individual bodies weakened by illness, and simultaneously offer prophetic protest against forces that make some bodies more vulnerable to dis-ease than others. Religions, spiritualities and health are concretely connected in the social body of the congregation and thence to the larger society by a dissenting moral vision of health that transcends that body.