What’s Next?: Public Health and Spirituality

Abstract

This present chapter concludes a 28 chapter volume on the relevance of religion and spirituality (R/S) to the field of public health. The volume contains 13 empirical reviews of R/S-health relations (Part I), two chapters addressing practical implications of R/S for public health (Part II), and eight chapters on how R/S factors have been incorporated into public health education and training offered at US-based schools and colleges of public health (Part III). This concluding chapter emphasizes common purposes between public health and religion/spirituality, advocating for both the study of religious/spiritual factors in health, and for positive and respectful collaboration. Even benignly ignoring religion and spirituality, the chapter asserts, is not an acceptable option. The chapter concludes by offering examples of needed future directions that include (1) the development of more educational materials for teaching about R/S factors in schools of public health; (2) the publication of additional systematic reviews and meta-analyses of R/S-health relations, especially in subfields of public health where few such reviews are present; (3) Exploration of appropriately structured and possibly multi-level interventions that synergistically combine spiritual components with meditation and/or mindfulness practices; and (4) Further exploration and testing of the cross-cultural generalizability of major constructs and findings in Western-dominated R/S-health research.