*CFP* “RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY, AND HEALTH”, BOOK CHAPTERS, ROUTLEDGE

While the context of the ‘chronic’ condition is most well known as medical and treatment oriented, this collection will reflect on chronic health and wellness beyond the diagnosis of chronic medical conditions. The authors will bring a critical lens for the exploration of cultural and daily experiences of various forms of chronic conditions and wellness in relation to practices of spirituality and faith. 

Chronicity as a framework, with a focus on the meaning-centered aspects of illness experiences over time, will set the stage for this collection, considering that chronic conditions draw together developed and developing countries, the global North and South, East or West. 

This inter- and transdisciplinary collection invites contributors and leading scholars in the cultural and social sciences, medical professionals, psychotherapists, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, nurses, and practitioners of complementary and alternative across the fields of anthropology, sociology, psychology, health education, and social work to understand, rethink, and transform spiritual and faith-based striving in health care. We take as our theoretical point of departure the phenomenological and hermeneutic, meaning-making traditions, as the co-authors share a concern for the manifold struggles that abound amidst living with and management of chronic conditions. 

This collection is innovative in that it explores spirituality and faith in a way that doesn’t presuppose benefits or pitfalls, but rather, how people explore their own day-to-day practices in the context of chronic conditions. The collection is not designed to place value on any specific type of faith or spiritual practice, but rather focusses on peoples’ lived experience, attending to both the social and individual, structural and existential.

  

Topics of interest for your submission may include, but are not limited to:

• A global focus on practices of spirituality or faith, and how these may intersect with cultural and individual experiences of chronic health and wellness.
• Faith-based and spiritual practices that are transformed, questioned or challenged amidst living with chronic conditions; practices that may shape or inform embodied forms coping, resistance, help-seeking practices, or self-care amidst what has been posited as chronicity. 
• A connection between faith-based and spiritual practices that impact or shape the interpersonal domains of social suffering, potentially also with a focus on the “social technologies.” 
• Issues around “quality of care” understood in the spiritual contexts of chronicity, including contradictory faith practices between clients and professionals. 
• What is most at stake for people who draw on faith or spirituality in their management of chronic conditions, and particularly the moral contours of daily experience; and in relation to family and the professionals they are seeking help from? 
• Exploring how spiritual and faith-based resources are mobilized in contexts of chronicity for acts of social justice, change, and societal transformation? Is this a political endeavor and if so, in what way? What can be gained from this through a political sphere? 
• Peoples’ relationships to temporality and how they may be shaped by modes of spiritual and faith-based striving.
• Explorations of narrative and how the story about living with chronic conditions I told in context of spiritual or faith-based coping?

Further details:

The collection editors have been invited by and spoken directly with the content editor at Routledge who has expressed serious interest in the project, and has invited us to submit a formal proposal once we have chapter contributors confirmed.

If interested to contribute a chapter to this collection, please submit a (or thereabouts) outlining the basic vision, introduction, methods, results, and discussion or conclusion sections (if relevant) of the intended chapter, to the collection editors.

We are inviting abstract submissions from now until September 15th 2019 at which time we intend to complete the full proposal to Routledge with contributing author and chapter details.

We then expect the submission of authors’ final chapters would be received in the spring of 2020 and be around 6000-9000 words complete with references and accompanying details. We welcome both theoretical and empirical contributions, although the priority will be given to qualitative pieces that focus on aspects of daily lived experiences of spiritual and faith-based practices amidst chronic conditions as loosely depicted above. Any further questions can be directed to the collection editors.