Research on the relationships among religion, spirituality and health has grown dramatically over the past decade. It is clear from the literature that many in research, in health care, in the public, and in government, believe that important positive connections have been established and should be vigorously studied. It is also clear that others are unconvinced and even hostile to the subject.
It is not surprising that such a deeply felt subject should be controversial when it makes its way into a field such as medicine. Nor should it be surprising that such a complex topic as spirituality and religion, having been left out of scientific inquiry for so long, should prove difficult to study with the methods of science. Yet there actually can be no serious question about whether religion and spirituality have important connections to health.
The difficulty of clearly and concisely stating the distinctions and relationships between spirituality and religion runs through the field of spirituality, religion and health and necessarily through this analysis of the field. The issue will be dealt with in some detail below. But even to begin this essay requires the establishment of a simple and non-controversial convention for the use of the terms. Without suggesting that this solves the problems of terminology I will stipulate the following definitions:.
Thus spirituality is the more general term, it includes religion, and spirituality is a core aspect of religion. This does not deny that there are spiritual but not religious individuals or that extrinsically religious people may not be especially spiritual. This greater emphasis on problems should not be taken to indicate fundamental flaws in the field. In their Handbook of Religion and Health , given their very thorough search strategy which had yielded approximately references.
Although a small number of references from the year are included in their bibliography, it seems that the cut-off for thorough coverage was the end of The spirituality and the religion searches were carried out separately.
