Sacred-in-Practice: A Framework for Teaching Religion, Health, and Medicine

This essay proposes an unconventional approach to teaching "religion and medicine" to American medical students. Received frameworks for such teaching-articulated around faith denomination or "spirituality"-may imply that religiosities and their health effects are grounded in theology or transcendence, respectively. These frameworks may reify, or misrepresent relationships between, religion and science-for example, in supporting notions of conflict, or of an essentially secular character of technical progress. They can neglect ways in which biomedicine and its institutions are themselves engaged with and productive of religious values. In order to move toward fuller student appreciation of diverse religious materialities and embodiments in health and biomedicine, the essay proposes "the sacred, in practice" as an organizing rubric. This pedagogical intervention pivots on notions of sacrality in anthropologies of religion and offers students a wide path to consider a spectrum of material, gestural conditions, and activities-transformative techniques, intensely valued objects, trusted texts, rituals-that mark and propagate religious valences and commitments within and around contemporary biomedicine. This sacred-in-practice approach meshes with standard theological and spiritual framings of the religion/health/medicine nexus, yet offers more capacious and flexible connections to work for which medical students are training, involving vulnerable bodies and material technologies of tremendous life- and world-shaping potency.