By Gary Gunderson

There are times when, amid what seems like chaos, clarity comes, is named and made visible. People respond, turn around, and make choices that lead to life. The closing months of 2024 are likely this kind of time.

When the times comes—some call it Kairos—one hopes the intellectual muscles are trained and ready. It takes time to think hard, and not possible to do alone staring at tiny screens.  (To get anywhere intellectually is just like hiking: “to go fast, go alone; to go far, go together”).

Friday morning, we learned that Handbook on Religion and Health: Pathways for a Turbulent Future was published. Only 1,155 days ago Jim Cochrane was asked to consider editing a volume on religion and health. Teresa Cutts, or TC, encouraged him: “Yes! Do this and blow the field wide open!” Eventually, 33 authors from around the world typed 502 pages of very hard and explosive thinking that none of us could have done alone.

TC and I celebrated the publication at a Glasgow pub. “What’s it about?”, asked a bewildered friend, trying to be respectful. This question has come about everything I’ve ever written. The answer makes it worse, especially in a loud pub: “It’s about the intersection of faith (no, not that dumb kind!) and health (no, not the pills and machines!).” The real answer is almost too audacious to say out loud, even in a pub after more than one pint.

It’s about the leading causes of life, here, now.

“The first step in such fundamental research,” we wrote in our concluding chapter of the Handbook, “would be to understand the nature of the living system in question.In a nitty-gritty practical kind of way, confronting an ugly and terrifying contagion of polio, Jonas Salk of polio vaccine fame, knew he had to learn how to think like a virus or, as he put it, follow ‘the biological way of thought,’ before focusing on all the symptoms and damage the virus inflicts. A virus may not think in the way a human does, but in its own way it makes choices, indeed patterns of choices, as it adapts, moves as an organism inside and around the human creature that is also making choices and patterns of choices to create the ecology in which the virus finds its way. Something like this nesting of living systems is happening in every component of every living system. Part of what a virus must “consider” or “think” about is how it understands its relationship to the larger ecology of systems including the human one.

Maybe the virus has a more accurate view of what constitutes the human living system than do most humans; perhaps even those thinking about the health of the human public. A virus “sees” any one human as an inseparable part of a meshwork of other bodies offering a rich array of slightly different bio-psycho-chemistries linked in a connected social network that allows the virus to move around the entire living system as a single, if differentiated and variable, whole” (p. 453).

The implications are profoundly hopeful for us humans. We have the intellectual leverage to break out of our doom loop of compounding stupidities. We are alive. And life has found its (our!) way for roughly three and a half billion years.

And even more hopefully, we have more to work with than any other part of the living system. We are capable of knowing ourselves (sapiens sapiens), but even more since spirit gives us the capacity to see dynamic emergent complexity that is us, in the spirited cosmos that is built for life.

“Public health science and public religion,” we also write (p. 456), “are best understood as co-creating components of a kind of consciousness of the planetary human phenomenon. The first immunizes humanity from the disease of premature certainty, the second from hubris and heart-heartedness. Science animates the religious ethical imagination by clarifying the boundaries and possibilities of mercy, while religion holds science accountable to serve all, not just whoever paid for the research or technical gizmo. Science protects religion from simply making things up, while religion protects science from overlooking the most obvious things—we are children of one family.”

The Handbook is published, but as an invitation to the hard thinking we need, it is just beginning. The official release is in Washington DC on September 27 and 28, with other events planned in Minneapolis, La Crosse, Winston-Salem, Houston, Cape Town and elsewhere. The baobabs on the cover, on the website of the Leading Causes of Life Initiative , and for the preceding African Religious Health Assets Programme, are not just pretty. At every intellectual step we have figuratively gathered in the African way under the shelter of the ‘tree of life’ where we can talk deeply with each other about what matters most.

I’ve been thinking of the many people who have carried me on this spirited intellectual current, such as Reverend Larry Pray who came into my life as part of the CDC funded Institute of Public Health and Faith. The Handbookends with the story of when he called me at the hospital in Memphis, urging me to grab the Bible he assumed (wrongly) I had on my desk. Liz Dover had one, so I was able to follow Larry to Ezekiel: “And on the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither, nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing” (English Standard Version Bible, 2006, Exekiel 47:12). 

The Handbook on Religion and Health: Pathways for a Turbulent Future is available in hardback immediately (priced for academic libraries!) with an eBook coming in a week or two ($48), and, we anticipate (not yet confirmed), with a paperback to follow later. Most of my friends will wait for the paperback or eBook! I’ll let you know when they are available.