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Karen O'Brien-Kop and Suzanne Newcombe eds., "Religion, Spirituality and Public Health" (British Academy, 2025)
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Dr. Raj Balpuran
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Dr. Raj Balpuran
Welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome back to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Balpuran. More importantly, have the double delight of welcoming back to the podcast doctors Karen o' Brien Cobb and Susanne com, co editors of a brand new open access publication. Link in your podcast Notes religion, spirituality and public health competing in complementary epistemes. This is a result of proceedings of the British Academy. More on that momentarily. Welcome.
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Suzanne Com
A pleasure. Thanks.
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Karen O'Brien Cobb
Great to be here.
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Dr. Raj Balpuran
So I think I already, you know, slightly teased or spoiled the backstory. But what's the backstory of this volume?
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Suzanne Com
Where do we start?
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Dr. Raj Balpuran
At the beginning.
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Suzanne Com
I mean I have a long standing interest in health and healing and minority religions but I think probably that the real kind of straw was Covid and seeing everything that was was being said about health and healing and and how people were making decisions from a real variety of different perspectives reasons. Why were people making the decisions they were making? Why were governments making the decisions they were making? How did we make decisions? How did we decide what was true? I think that was. It was such a crisis point even though it was highlighting things that went before. Kind of nothing was new but it was this moment of clarity where you could really see some of the fault lines of how we do things. I don't know. What would you say, Karen?
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Karen O'Brien Cobb
Well, I think if we roll back even further you and I have, I think successfully co edited a prior book which was enjoyable and productive. And I remember us having a conversation at the British Library of a tea about epistemology of health and sharing ideas about pitching for a conference and potential publication. So I mean I too work on the topic of health from a different angle. I'm more of a humanities scholar or indeed history of religions and enjoy collaborating with Suzanne, who's a sociologist. So we put together a bid through the British Academy and Wellcome Trust to look at the post Covid public health landscape in relation to religious health epistemology or you know, knowledge reasoning about health and healing that were rooted in religious grounds. So that was the inception of the conference from which the book was a output.
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Dr. Raj Balpuran
Yeah, I love the backstory behind the backstory. It's very prerogative. I like it. So while of course, of course, as so many of our colleagues are doing fascinating and important work in the humanities, you know, I think it's relatively rare that we ourselves take the next step or that our work is received towards the next step of something very practical, something very timely. I mean it's clear to us, I think in our ruminations and our reading that what we do is extraordinarily timely and extraordinarily relevant. No question about that. And I think that works like this. Render that by their very concept, render that through line of what we do as scholars and sociologists of religion and how the world works, how we react to pandemics, how we shape policy. I think it's crucial and I think it's welcome to see. For example, when I study sort of Ethics of Violence or in the Val Nikita Minor or the Mahabharata, it just so happens, unable to connect that to IHL International Entering Law or Modern discourse on War and Peace. But it doesn't mean that that research is any more or less valuable in and of itself. But I think when we're able to connect it, it allows others to see the clear value of what we're doing. So I quite love that bridge you're straddling. Also it's refreshing to see a collaboration between a historian and a sociologist. I think maybe some sort of a great way forward might be to talk about your individual contributions to the volume because you begin with them, I believe a little bit close to the beginning. Anyone even want to go first?
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Suzanne Com
Well, I think that Karen's chapter is more. We did the introduction together that was very much a. A co written thing that went through lots of drafts and I guess maybe what I'd say to begin with is I did quite a lot of the. Trying to build a conversation with the conference itself. And that was really one of the main points. And also that continues through this book. So it's really hard to concentrate on some of the stuff we're talking about in this book and hard to think. Think about and so bringing people together to have this conversation. And Karen didn't actually present this chapter at the conference, but it came out of the whole discussion, I think, and really frames the book nicely. Now Karen has to talk about it.
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Karen O'Brien Cobb
Well, I think, I mean, the opening chapter just lays out the main topics in terms of the conversation between religion and science and in a sense highlighting the importance of truth in this age of conspiracy theorizing about health claims and highlighting all kinds of important topics like epistemic injustice in relation to health and which paradigms we can depend upon in both religious and scientific cultures. Um, but I think one of the most interesting things to me. No, sorry, I've lost my. My thread of thought.
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Suzanne Com
I can talk if you want a longer minute. One of the things I love about Karen's introduction, which is chapter two, is the way it engages with a philosophy of lived religion. Because in the way that religious studies is often framed in Britain at least, I'm not sure how much in North America or in your global audience is often framed in terms of religion, philosophy and ethics. And my colleagues in philosophy still present religion and. Or still really present this idea of a justified true belief as being central. But as religious studies scholars, for years we've been changing a narrative towards actually people are much more messy people. People have in incompatible beliefs. They operate on a much more. A much more lived in the old model. You want to say irrational, but it's not irrational. And that's one of the points we really want to make in the book. And I think the way that Karen is putting forward a much more rigorous way of thinking about lived religious practice as a real thing that we've got to take into account of in dialogue with philosophy is really helping to move that conversation forward, which I keep trying to have with my philosophy colleagues, but don't quite have the words to push back in their language.
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Dr. Raj Balpuran
That's actually a salient point and particularly for publications such as this, which will no doubt be cross posted to most of all of the religion channeled in books that work. I want to see a bit about the point you're making along these lines.
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Karen O'Brien Cobb
So I think it's about taking this term epistemology seriously in a broader context. Than just systematic theological philosophy of religion. So if we think about religious epistemology, it's often connected with proofs for God. Does God exist? Does God not exist? And that's typically what is often thought about when we connect those two terms, religion and some kind of theory of knowledge epistemology. So my chapter attempts to broaden the scope for this kind of rigorous approach by, as Suzanne said, one taking it into a lived religion context and taking seriously the argument that just because people aren't engaged in formal debate about proofs for God doesn't mean that we don't have systematic reasoning with criteria and verification and certification and evidence, but in an everyday context of reason giving. Now, that applies to all manner of aspects of everyday religious life, but it also applies to choices that are made about one's health and choices that are made about how one engages with different options for healthcare and healing and public health and private health and community health. So in a sense, it's a philosophy of religion at a community scale. And I think that's more necessary than ever, because during COVID what we saw was that there were certain minoritized or marginalized religious communities who were perhaps uncomfortable about engaging with public health vaccine rollouts, for example, or who are maybe excluded from particular conversations and strategies at the level of policy. And so I think the book is really about taking seriously the basis on which minoritized religious communities think about and reason about health and being able to take lessons from the post Covid public health landscape and to, in a sense, conceptualize what we could do differently in the future. You know, to have better engagement and a better cultivated dialogue between public health and religious communities, whereby, you know, there's an understanding that there isn't just one paradigm of knowledge making in the room, that people, as Suzanne said, live in all kinds of messy, complex, overlapping realities. And it's to the detriment of the public health policymaking process. I think we think we've argued and all of our authors have argued, if, you know, the kind of implicit collective reasoning of certain religious communities is not taken seriously.
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Dr. Raj Balpuran
Yes, so many fascinating ideas there. What resonates greatly is this idea of, well, how do we handle next time, you know, how do we move forward and how do we learn from the lessons and some of the struggles that we've endured this time in pretending as if humans are not motivated by a variety of factors and perspectives and rationales is not the way forward. Pretending as if we've entirely internalized this view, that it's either scientific materialism or Abrahamic theology, particularly Christian creator, God discourse. You know, there are so many other perspectives and so many other ways of being, ways of knowing and ways of deciding and perhaps, perhaps compartmentalizing. Compartmentalization of source is useful in that that is often themselves respond to various aspects of their lives. But I love that frame, that frame of well there, sure, perhaps we can consider certain individuals in our view as you know, non rational actors. But that's a little lazy, little simplistic because there are a great many reasons for which people do why they do, which may not. They may not just be an interruption of what you think of as rational, but they may be irrational or trans rational. It's not just the binary of rational. So I love that frame. I think as we look at some of these fascinating papers, we will exemplify Newman the thrust of the book if
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Suzanne Com
I can just throw in the framing of the book like Karen mentioned minoritized different populations and how they were treated differently in Covid. But one of the things I really wanted to try to break down in our choice of, in our framing and in the choice of chapters as a whole was this kind of us them biony binary so that they're different, we're normal, we're making rational choices. They're not. Because on the one hand I think we're all drawing on a variety of evidence and experience and community knowledge on consequences based on where we're positioned in different power systems. And that cuts across all the US thems. But we have lots of different local social contexts. But also we tried to pick different places globally so that the normative framings of truth and how you deal with a public health crisis could be compared cross culturally and not just from the western biomedical normative judgment. And we would have liked to push that further, but we did a good job of starting the conversation.
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Dr. Raj Balpuran
Best books and beginnings without question. It's I mean, it's who's gonna, you know, it's great. It's great to it's great to start along this path. And I'm sure, much as myself, you welcome folks to engage it, critique it, improve it, expand on it as they see fit. So perhaps we can turn to some of the case studies that really exemplify what you're trying to do. Variations on this, to kind of crystallize it for the listeners.
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Karen O'Brien Cobb
I think one of the interesting questions that is raised in different ways by the different case studies is the subtitle of the book Competing and Complementary Essistemes. And in a sense, that does suggest a kind of expectation of a binary that we're going to find these epistemic stances that are either in friction and opposition and competition or that there's going to be some kind of integration. But I think what the case studies for me threw up was that it often wasn't just that either, or situation of opposition or integration, but that there were other kinds of hierarchies of choice and pragmatic decisions and kind of strategic approaches that are quite nuanced and quite subtle and as Suzanne says, are context specific according to the different cultural tradition being discussed. So I think for me, some of the chapters that are particularly interesting are those that look at the experience of healthcare in a hospital setting during COVID or perhaps not during COVID but the way that subjects make pragmatic choices about the efficacy of public health in relation to their religious identity. So one example is a chapter by Abel Ugba, who looked at British African Pentecostal Christian communities in the uk. Specifically, he was thinking about London and about communities that were rooted in Ghana and Nigeria. And there is a sort of, you know, a great tradition of members of those communities being members of the National Health Service as medical staff in the uk. And his is a sociological study, qualitative research, interviews and so forth. But there was one interview with an NHS nurse who was a British African Pentecostal nurse, and she talked about her identity as a nurse in public health. She'd been on the ward for 10 or 20 years, entirely dedicated to the British NHS, but in a sense, superseding that. Superseding her daily rounds on the ward was her belief in divine healing, which came from her religious identity. And so she talked about this kind of almost like a cascade of authority, where it was always divine healing that determined the outcomes of her professional administration on the ward. But there was never any questioning of the efficacy of biomedicine. So the antibiotics work, of course they do, the medicine works, the surgery works, but it was always due to the grace of God. And so she talked about the differences, for example, in her early employment on a Ghanaian hospital floor, where all the doctors and nurses would come together openly and collectively at the start of the day to pray for divine healing to, in a sense, come through their work during the day, their biomedical duties. And she compared that to her approach in the uk, where she felt that that wasn't, you know, that kind of belief wasn't diminished, but it had to be hidden, it had to be occluded. So she would start, as soon as she got into the changing room, she would start asking for that divine healing to come through. She'd get into her nurse's outfit, she would go on the ward and she would send healing to all her patients in different ways throughout the day, but obviously in a private, personal, unobservable way. So I thought that was a kind of interesting pragmatic approach where it was more than an integration, which in a sense, I think sometimes suggests a partnership of equals, because this wasn't a partnership of equals. It was definitely a kind of hierarchical privileging of divine healing. But it didn't compromise her commitment to and belief in biomedicine. And that's quite a specific instance because it's not just about personal healthcare choice. This is also about, you know, professional responsibility and, you know, the sort of motivation that imbues her professional life as a. As a healthcare worker.
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Dr. Raj Balpuran
Yeah, that's so fascinating for this case study. Also, I think what this case study does is it documents and it thinks through a probably fairly pervasive code, switching among various adherents, practitioners, the religious, the spiritual, all the above, none of the above, where there is a pragmatic approach insofar as, you know, if one is bleeding, one does not necessarily need the healer, but one may go to the hospital and call the healer and say, say prayerful. Or in this case, these two roles are combined with the same person. But I see this quite often. I see this a lot, actually, whether in clients and various people that I speak to, that even people in the medical professional who have their own practices and their own, you know, their own relationships, religion and faith, where grace is not seen as something that interrupts materiality, but materiality is seen as a manifestation of grace. So grace is the stent at the right time. Grace is the blood infusion. Grace is the antibiotic that you finally get your hands on that one can't take for granted. And so this really, really has fascinating consequences for the worldview that's implied. These two realms interpenetrating. There's so many reverberations we see in indication really just. Really just studies across the board, but really is, I think, a fascinating people. So I think how. How many people work who have spiritual beliefs and are yet not. And yet are not impractical?
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Suzanne Com
I mean, another kind of tension which was brought out by someone we dialogued with about the book, was around really different understandings of the world and the kind of mechanisms by which disease acts. And this is quite fascinating as well. And again, it's not necessarily in a way that is strictly in conflict or there's some kind of compromise, but it's like. So one of the examples of this, I think, is really well illustrated in Sujatha's chapter around how Tamil Nadu Public health dealt with the symptomatic and ecological understanding of the causes of fevers and how to strengthen a human body's immune system through traditional systematized remedies that they could draw on. And this isn't necessarily anti vax or not anti vax. It's just another way of describing a world that both sits on top of and parallel to and can be acted in either a pragmatic or a kind of oppositional way with the kind of biomedical, materialist narrative that so dominated that period of time.
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Dr. Raj Balpuran
Yeah. You know, what just comes to mind? Just randomly, sort of, not apropos, nothing necessarily, but what comes to mind is this really impactful. Considered a saint among our followers. Amma. Amma, the Purple Hagun guru. What's her son? Mata Amritanandam, I believe, is her Sanskrit name. Extraordinary individual by any standard, sort of giving her her setting or her gender, her caste, and then mobilizing millions of people to do, you know, colossal good in the world. Nevertheless, she's seen as an embodiment of the divine. And her. Her followers will adopt various practices, whether to her, whether to Hindu deities. So there's an emphasis on, you know, meditation, prayer, Japa mantra. Yet she was like one of the first people to say, I remember, came across, I think, on someone's Facebook feed, a link for her where she was saying, you know, my children, go get vaccinated. Go get vaccinated. Yes, pray to God. Leave it in God's hands. Mother is with you. Go get vaccinated. And there was no real schism in her message. It wasn't. There was no sort of, well, is it one or is it the other? It was to many, it was received as, yes, you know, yes, we can pray to God to win the lottery, but who has to buy the ticket, Right? So Jesus came to mind for some reason. All right, do we want to talk about any of the other contributions?
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Karen O'Brien Cobb
I think, I mean, what you've just illustrated is that sort of relationship of. Yes. And so, yes, pray to God and get the vaccine.
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Suzanne Com
Yeah, absolutely.
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Dr. Raj Balpuran
Welcome to South Asia.
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Karen O'Brien Cobb
Right. But also perhaps welcome to Brazil because another chapter by John Bahia, which looks at Afro Brazilian traditions, is a specific case study of the COVID ward and specifically critically ill patients who were on life support, who were intubated. And she interviews one subject extensively, Mr. Francisco, who was in a coma and so lost consciousness and was in critical care for quite a long time, being tended to by doctors and nurses in a state hospital. But he came out of the coma he recovered from COVID and in the interview with the researcher, he talks about a dual reality, which isn't exactly a parallel reality, but it's almost like a simultaneous stretching of time and space. So he believed that he was both on the hospital ward and he describes in great detail simultaneously being in another realm, which was this kind of fantastical landscape with costumes and waterfalls and healers, where he was also at the same time being attended to by his spiritual healers, his guides from his religious worldview, and being administered a particular elixir and rituals, et cetera. And so he believed, in a sense, if I'm interpreting this correctly, Suzanne, that his healing was a product of both of those processes simultaneously. So it's another really interesting case study where it's more than the complementary. It's not within the realm of kind of friction or contested epistemes, but there's something quite nuanced and quite subtle about the way that people seem to be able to occupy more than one epistemic standpoint in a very kind of integral, comprehensive way. At the same time, with Sam's Club,
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Dr. Raj Balpuran
Yeah, I've come across this more times than I can count. I see to myself at times. And the best way that I can describe it, I think I gave a talk from University of Michigan. I think John Coyne had invited me. Timeless time of post. Covid maybe four or five years ago was on zoom. And really one of the themes that came out from his questions. Well, clearly you speak to a wide range of people. On the one hand, there's sort of graduate students, specialist conferences, undergrads, and then it goes into continuing studies, which generally is more within the eating perspective, but very practice friendly. And you also speak to practitioners and at the very far extreme, initiates. And so how is that accomplishable with integrity. And, and what came to mind was just code switching. It's not the denial of one or the other. It is the ability to hold paradox and it's the ability to sort of. We might think of it as karmatomization, but I think it's not even it goes above and beyond compartmentalization because there is, there is a sense that the realms, for lack of better words, sort of, you know, physical. The reality that we're in physically physical time, space, that which is amenable to empirical screening and, and, and whatever else is gentleman that's positing, whether it's something from a subconscious, whether it's archetypes of the collective unconscious, whether these entities have actual ontological reality. The same question comes to mind when people report experiences on Ayahuasca and then receive information staggering. However, I want to think of that it's understood not that one happens in isolation of the other, that they interpenetrate in an intriguing way. That the pragmatic of course, has its sway, but that it's somehow undergirded by forces that are beyond it. But it's not. Nor is it escapism, nor is it abandoning the pragmatic for the spiritual, if you will, or the unseen. And so I find that really, really fascinating. And I would infer, just as an armchair thinker in this niche, I would infer that this is a prevalent phenomenon, this is sort of code switching because we see many, many people in very pragmatic professions who have such beliefs and have such experiences. And I don't even necessarily think it's a modern phenomenon. They. Because the ancient worlds that we know of show marks of great ingenuity and sort of critical thinking and math and science on some level or certain engineering. And yet there might be this code switching.
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Suzanne Com
I mean, I think your use of code switching is really interesting. And it kind of brings up like. That's often used in like the ability. Well, in Britain is the ability of someone to maybe do a middle class split speak, even though they're from a working class background. And that gives them access to greater social capital and they're taken more seriously. They might get different kinds of jobs if they can mask their working class accent. So there's something that's interesting that's going on there because you're using it slightly differently and talking about these different ontological realities. But the people who get to do that without consequence are the people with high social capital. So if you're really wealthy, then people don't really care if you have these eccentric beliefs and if you've got a lot of other kinds of social capital. But one of the things I really wanted to draw out kind of between the lines in this discussion, in the book, in the conference, is the way that on the one hand we're all doing this kind of code switching all the time and we're being dishonest about it. And I think that if we go back to some of the, I mean, those Karen and I, as, as you as a host know, have a background in Indian practices and, and philosophies and some of the more nuanced ways these were described in ancient texts, but not only in India and China. Different ways of knowing, different ways of coming to decisions, I think can be really helpful in being more honest about what we're doing. And I'm gonna keep talking, I think, but that's one of the things I really wanted to uncover in the chapter that I wrote, which was about how in the popularization of Ayurveda and yoga as a mode of healing in early 20th century colonial India, it had to code switch and use the language of science, which had a particular traditional framing, which was around kind of like the placebos and double blind scientific studies and traditional texts as sources of epistemic authority. But in actual fact, what I see being undervalued in traditional, Ayurvedic and Yoga context is a, a systematic and repeatable attention to experience. Both the experience of the individual who's suffering and the experience of the person who's providing some kind of intervention. And people are trained to pay more attention to the nuances of experience. They're trained to notice things about the environment. And this isn't random, this isn't anti scientific, this is very empirical. But it's gotten a bit confused and lost by trying to code switch into some kind of colonialist scientific speak, which was necessary at the time. But we can kind of start to unpack that now.
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Karen O'Brien Cobb
And I think going back to public health, it's interesting the way that this code switching I think takes us from ontology to epistemology. So it takes us from experiential embodied reality, which public health policy is in a sense less able to engage with or even to take seriously on its own terms. But in the age of that we live in, in which so much emphasis is placed on reasoning and truth in relation to choices about health such as vaccine uptake, then what public health can concentrate on, I think is the epistemology of these realities, if not the ontology. So for example, Suzanne mentioned how we had both reach back into Indian history, cultural, philosophical. And in my chapter I was interested in making the argument that if from a public health standpoint or a biomedical standpoint, vaccine hesitancy, vaccine resistance is dismissed as conspiracy theories that are outlandish, nonsensical, coming from an uneducated, irrational place, for example, then again, again that opportunity for dialogue is missed. And in my chapter I tried to put the emphasis on conspiracy theorizing rather than conspiracy theory. So it's not really about the theory, which could be theory A or B, but it's about acknowledging that there is a systemic aspect to how communities form these beliefs. And if we're able to in a sense epistemically break down what those mechanisms are, there is then more opportunity to intervene and to counter untruth with fact and with truth.
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Suzanne Com
Or maybe it doesn't even matter. You don't need to push a truth down, you need to figure out why and how is someone coming to the decisions they're coming to and what pathway is going to cause the least amount of harm and suffering.
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Karen O'Brien Cobb
Right? And I think that's where, for example, I drew inspiration from Buddhist logic from the first millennium CE in pre modern South Asia, where, you know, there are certain Buddhist philosophers who say, well Perception is important. Of course it is. Everyone says that perception should be the most trusted way to arrive at truth, what we see with our own eyes. But actually inference for certain Buddhist philosophers is more important because inference is based on what coheres with what you can only infer based on being able to rest on assured prior truths that cohere with each other. And actually when we look at conspiracy theorizing, when it rests on perception, I've seen this with my own eyes, I've seen this video on YouTube, such and such told me face to face that this was true. It can actually be a really unreliable way of arriving at some kind of fact based decision. And it is when we put inference and coherence back into the process of truth making in those kinds of communities or forums that actually it gets tested much more critically. And that's, I think, as Suzanne said, it's an important approach in taking seriously how minoritized communities, whether they're secular or religious, arrive at truth and giving us tools to analyze and better understand what the processes of reasoning are.
- [40:28]
Dr. Raj Balpuran
Yeah, I think one of the key ideas there is process. It's not the product of the epistemology, the ontology, the experience, it's the process. And engaging in the process is inalienable from engaging with their experience. There are lots of fascinating threads to what you said, and it's not that it just so happens a couple of days ago I was in hospital as an application for a procedure. I'm okay, I assure you, I will live as far as I know. But it was a procedure. And then I tend to ask for the reports because I realized more and more that irrespective of how skilled your practitioners are, you really have to be. They have to be sort of consultants and really have to manage and communicate across them. And so absolute growth. And I'm reading this report about, and the reports obviously in medical speak, and it's obviously talking, it's documenting the objective procedures and the amounts of medication and anesthetic and everything. And there's one teeny line about what I said I presented with and the very reason we're having the procedure and the very thing that was minimized by the first doctor to say, well, are you sure it's not because of some soreness because of your working out? No, I'm not a blithering idiot. I didn't say those terms. But I did say, no, of course not. If I'm working out for a decade, this is different. And so I found it so fascinating. The whole reason I was There wasn't because of an objective test, it was because of a, of an experience that I was having. And it took a long time for anyone to take that experience seriously because it wasn't documented anything upon the procedure. They completely saw exactly what was there and there's a path forward to remedy it. So I'm very grateful. But there, there was just so little engagement or prioritization of what I was experiencing. And I wasn't saying I was channeling, you know, my dead relatives, I was talking about actual experiences of my body in a very clear, concise, cogent way after ruling out a bunch of things myself, which I explained to them. And it's not one or the other, but it's how do we integrate the experience of the individual, Wherever that experience is coming from, there needs to be space for that. That's only going to help us be better physicians, better citizens, better policymakers. Thanks.
- [43:00]
Karen O'Brien Cobb
I mean, one of the questions that you asked at the beginning was how do we get to that better future where we have enhanced health at public and community level? And I think obviously this book is a one limited contribution which is more theoretical, more academic, but it's important on policy making committees to have consultations, to have public facing committees that draw in patients, community leaders, people off the street with different kinds of cultural, epistemic, political, religious beliefs, so that there's better listening, there's better accommodation of patient agency, patient narratives, patient processes of truth making. I think that's really important. And then of course, what's also important is to have more rigorous, scaled up scientific trials of different kinds of healthcare systems alongside each other and in different kinds of integrated ways. And actually one of the chapters in the book that deals with that is by Kin Chung, who looks at placebo effects and QI and biomedical hegemony and scientific trials, and he critiques randomized control trials, but nonetheless also advocates for a different way forward for scientific research in relation to, you know, what are seen as alternative or complementary or indeed competing knowledge systems about health.
- [44:40]
Suzanne Com
I think another thing I want to draw out though is also just the, I mean, the incorporation of individual experience. There's some movement towards that. It's pretty common in, in the British system now to have some kind of patient review board. But there's still these really important power imbalances about who has the money, who makes the decisions about what is and isn't allowed treatment, what isn't, isn't allowed to be studied and in what way. And those power inequalities often drive a lot of the US Them thinking and conspiracy theories, which are to some extent real conspiracies. And to some extent it's quite bad thinking sometimes. And one needs to tease out and take seriously the anxieties, the personal experiences and the aspects of truth, as well as the kind of, I don't know, just the complexity of the situation. But what I wanted to get to though was the way we're all subject to these local power things, but we are also subject to a kind of a transition local environment. And there's a few chapters that really talk about trans religiosity and the way that no part of the world is isolated. We're all exposed to these different ideas about health and healing. We, we have on the one hand, quite a lot of individual agency to, to kind of pick and mix, but on the other hand we're. We're deep, deeply embedded in our histories and our communities. And so for. For other people in other contexts, your choices is more about who. Who is your local community that you don't want to lose relationship with and what are the consequences of that. And your choice is bound in different ways than someone else in a different localized context. That sounds very abstract. Give me a second. I'll try to come up with a
- [46:27]
Dr. Raj Balpuran
more concrete example and take your time. And also for either both of you, if there's anything else, any of the contributions you might like to touch on, feel free. And also, one of the questions that really, I think, especially applies to this book is who's this book for?
- [46:45]
Karen O'Brien Cobb
Well, Suzanne and I had a vision that it could be for a slightly broader audience than people situated in academic departments in universities. So in the design of the conference, even in the lineup of speakers, to a certain extent to the people who were present in the audience, we wanted to include individuals who worked or researched in public health. And we also were able to capture some of the videos of the conference and to be able to share those more broadly with different kinds of audiences. So it's definitely a publication that seeks to. To reach beyond academia, but it is quite
- [47:37]
Suzanne Com
trying to. It is quite phrased in academic terms like we are talking all the time about the distinction between epistemology and episteme and why we think that's important. But I don't want listeners to feel too scared of engaging with the book if those are unfamiliar words or concepts, because actually a lot of the case study examples are quite accessible. Some of the ones that Karen mentioned about the hospital situation, I mean, you mentioned Raj, about people's ayahuasca experiences. And there's A chapter about psychedelic self care and therapy, which is also interestingly both very cross cultural, transnational, but also highly individualistic. So what are the stories we tell about these interventions and how does that impact on healing? What can we do different and better? And yeah, so it is kind of engaging at high level philosophical, academic concepts, but we also do want to broaden it out and have a practical relevance to people who are ready to bring those ideas into more practical application.
- [48:50]
Dr. Raj Balpuran
Fantastic. Is there anything else about the publication in particular or project in general that you'd like to touch on before we close?
- [48:57]
Karen O'Brien Cobb
Perhaps just to say that maybe one way into the book would be to access some of those videos of the conference talks. And those are available on the Inform website, which is affiliated to King's College London. So Suzanne, do you have that website at your finger?
- [49:14]
Suzanne Com
Yeah, I can give it for Raj to put in the nights. I think another actually important thing is it's all open access. It's a fully open access book. So you can, with all the weird things people are doing, put it into a more accessible framework for you. You can make it into whatever kind of audio sound you need. I don't want to give people too many ideas, but it is there for you to engage with and to figure out which chapter you find interesting. You don't have to read it from COVID to cover, would just pick a chapter. And any chapter is an interesting way into thinking about these paradoxes and pragmatic solutions that are both cultural and individual in new ways. And you might then approach yourself or your neighbor or the next public health crisis in a slightly more generous way, I would hope.
- [50:10]
Dr. Raj Balpuran
Fantastic. Well, thank you both very much for your own podcast there. For those listening, what have we been speaking about? Well, we've been speaking about this brand new open access publication called Religion, Spirituality and Public Health. Competing and complimentary Epistemes. The link to the open access publication and the website are in the podcast notes. Time. Well, keep listening, keep reading and keep considering the ways in which you code switch from one milieu to another. Bye for now.
- [51:00]
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