Dear Readers,

This issue of P.H. marks merely the latest chapter in a three thousand year conversation between public health and organized religion.

The dialogue has not always been cordial. Throughout their long history of cohabitation, public health and religion have both joined hands and butt heads in the process of advancing their own sometimes inflexible agendas for bodily and spiritual well-being. These days, the two camps collide most often on the battleground of sexual health, where zealots on both sides conspire to prevent compromise. For most of health and religion’s common history, however, conflict has been the exception and synergy the rule. For every dispute over condom distribution one can point to a hundred examples of religious and medical officials working together to provide health services. P.H.’s interview with Reverend Huffstutler of New Orleans, during which we discussed the religious response to Hurricane Katrina, provides one especially vivid example of medical-clerical collaboration. For better or for worse, society’s clergy have always shared a special mandate with society’s healers to minister to the infirm.

Although the story of religion and health’s sometimes friendly and sometimes fraught relationship is an old one, acute observers are noting that the pace of interaction has been accelerating. As Christine Mathias persuasively argues, the most important figure to emerge on the African public health scene in the last five years may very well be someone most doctors have never heard of—the American evangelist Rick Warren. Across the Indian Ocean, Ben Siegel’s reporting on the Hindu-Muslim debate over circumcision in India shows how seemingly innocuous articles published in medical journals can explode into massive religious controversies. Finally, Tom Cannell and Norman Mudau’s research on AIDS funerals in South Africa poignantly suggests how in an era of devastating pandemics, the need for a spiritual component in public health interventions has never been greater. Healht and religion are inextricably bound, raising tricky questions about the future of healthcare.

Regular readers of P.H. will recognize this as our longest and most ambitious issue to date. The special energy we have put into producing this issue is no accident: health and religion demand sustained and simultaneous treatment, if only because they may well emerge as the two most influential ideologies of the twenty-first century.

Sincerely,

Christopher Glazek
Editor-in-Chief