Launch: Religion, health & Taking responsibility

Celebrating two new books with the Leading Causes of Life Initiative:Handbook on Religion and Health: pathways for a turbulent future

Edited by James R Cochrane, Gary R Gunderson, and Teresa Cutts. Edward Elgar Publishing, 2024.

Taking responsibility for the life of complex human ecosystems: deep accountability

Gary R Gunderson, James R Cochrane, with Fellows of the Leading Causes of Life Initiative. Anthem Press, 2025.

About this event

This event is co-hosted by Dr Tobias Müller (a Leading Causes of Life Initiative Fellow, longstanding member of the Cambridge Interfaith Research Forum, and presently Leverhulme Fellow in CRASSH) and Professor Esra Özyürek, instigator of CIP’s Religion and Global Challenges Initiative. It is supported by a small grant from the Cambridge Interfaith Research Forum and by the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH).

Respondents will include Dr Sara Silvestri, Dr Thandeka Cochrane (Kings College London), and Professor Corey Walker (Dean of the Faculty of Divinity at Wake Forest University, joining online).

This event is free to attend. We ask that guests register to assist with organisation. 

An extract from the Handbook’s foreword:

“The Handbook on Religion and Health is remarkable due to the credentials of the editors and authors, as well as the focus and approaches taken throughout the chapters. Doctors Cochrane, Cutts, and Gunderson are renowned experts in the field with diverse backgrounds themselves. They have assembled a roster of global leaders and challenged each of them to think outside the box and explore new solutions. This Handbook on
Religion and Health is not merely an up-to-date encyclopaedia on the topics but explores different approaches from previous anthologies on the topic.

“First is the emphasis on public health and populations rather than individuals which acknowledges, of course, that individuals or their personal beliefs on health make up populations. This focus entails involvement and working with communities and even considering planetary issues such as climate change. Second the editors challenged the authors (and hence, we the readers) to question standard norms and conventions involving both religion and public health. Finally, these principles involve the ‘pursuit of new pathways’ in seeking how religion and public health solutions can collectively improve well-being and health in communities.

“...Approaching religion and public health simultaneously is not without risk. We are all advised to avoid discussion of religion (and politics) in public. But to ignore the relationship between religion and health places society at even greater peril and misses so many opportunities for better lives. The mission of public health is closely aligned to the nearly universal social mission of most religions—we are in this together.

“Of course, it won’t be easy to embark on these joint missions. ....  This volume points the way for success.”

—James W Curran, MD, MPH; Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

About Taking responsibility (from the publishers)

“The long-awaited convergence of climate, economic, political, intellectual, faith and social failures gives many reasons for despair. The authors of this volume have spent their lives around the trauma of race and poverty in South Africa and the United States working with Nobel prize winners and those in townships and tenements. We have learned that hope is not delusional and accountability not naïve. But one must think clearly and deeply, untethered from the inadequate simplicities and false choices. We must be here now, with eyes wide open for when systems break down, as so many are today, knowing that they also break open new space for creative action.

“The authors lead the global web of thinker-doers through the Leading Causes of Life Initiative and national networks in Africa, Europe and the United States. They find coherence among profound thinking from fields never brought into alignment before drawn from by economists, mycelial researchers, anthropologists and health sciences working in the Artic to South Africa, and the tough neighbourhoods in between. This includes a consideration of the human capacities that allow us to act in and transform the world we inhabit, of the radical nature of joy in the face of despair, of the judgement of Nemesis on hubris and privilege, of the ‘value of everything’ contra price as definitive, of the idea of involution as distinguished from evolution, of the concept of ‘meshworks’ in our entanglement with others, and, finally, of the ‘theatre of the soul’ as the unity of the physical, the psychological, the political and the spiritual.

“Sharply sensitive to the urgency of careful thought and wise action, the authors help us see that life does find a way towards deep accountability for the life of complex human ecosystems. They ask us to take responsibility for this as a key to human flourishing and well-being.”