Religious Responses to Pandemics and Crises

Religions, 2023

The COVID-19 crisis truly challenged social interaction, the use of space and objects, as well as our sense of purpose and meaning in life. In this context, religious communities faced sudden interruption of their usual activities, lack of access to communal spaces and a global epidemic that summoned ancient “medieval plague” anxieties to work with. This article focuses on the vast repertoire of adaptations and reactions to the crisis that several religious communities developed in Spain. Our research is based on 40 conversations with members of Protestant and Evangelical denominations, Sunni Islam, Orthodox churches, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Church of Scientology, Baha’i, Seventhday Adventist Church, Christian Science and Paganism, all of them minorities in the traditionally Catholic country. To analyze this repertoire of adaptations we focus on three aspects: the general context of changes and challenges, the ritual adaptations and the subjective experience of the adaptations. Grace Q. Zhang’s theories on linguistic elasticity will be applied to understand the elasticity of ritual adaptations in COVID times.

2020

eBook collection of essays from Religious Studies Scholar at TAMU on Religious Groups responses during COVID-19 2020

HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, 2021

This article used a collaborative self-ethnography with a religious socio-anthropological viewpoint. This study could help to solve social problems through theological convergence in the Islamic milieu, especially that of the government’s formal Islamic organization and organic Islamic leaders of the society

Approaching Religion

Editorial of Approaching Religion, Vol. 11 Issue 2.

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2021

In times of crisis, humans have a tendency to turn to religion for comfort and explanation. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. Using daily data on Google searches for 95 countries, this research demonstrates that the COVID-19 crisis has increased Google searches for prayer (relative to all Google searches) to the highest level ever recorded. More than half of the world population had prayed to end the coronavirus. The rise amounts to 50% of the previous level of prayer searches or a quarter of the fall in Google searches for flights, which dropped dramatically due to the closure of most international air transport. Prayer searches rose at all levels of income, inequality, and insecurity, but not for the 10% least religious countries. The increase is not merely a substitute for services in the physical churches that closed down to limit the spread of the virus.

Studia Humana, 2021

A question arises regarding theology and its functions when trying to cope with the coronavirus pandemic. Surely Christian faith – along with other religions – can play a role in helping to deal with this crisis, both for individuals and collectively. Theology connects with the effort religious faith and Churches perform and provides models and ideas to highlight the Christian sense of what is happening, that is, in reference to a saving God. Four keys, rooted in the Christian tradition, are proposed that allow us to understand these difficult times in a meaningful way, that is, as revealing “signs of the times” for believers, assisting them in their struggle to cope with these challenging circumstances.

There are two diverse ways in which we measure the term religiosity and epidemics. But they do have a common channel of lineage. The names of that link belief and fright or it can have called that both are the opposite side of the same link. It is indeed the medical science that helps us get rid of any health ailment, but through the ages, the genre of human civilization has depicted that how people considered praying to God or practicing religious customs as a method to recover from the disease. In this paper, the authors have tried to highlight the health hazards that were predominant in two eras namely the 19th and the 20th century and how spirituality has linked the two eras with a common note of togetherness, which acted as one of the remedies to overcome the fright formed by the health hazards.

Religion, 2022

This introduction opens a collection of seven articles which investigate how religious communities negotiate demands for physical distance induced by governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in accord with their religious and spiritual aspirations to establish presence and togetherness. Grounded in ethnography and media analysis, our contributors offer studies on Pentecostal healing, Mormon eschatology, Hindu diasporic rituals, Chinese spirit mediums, the virtual Burning Man festival, Sufi sonic meditations, and televised Shia Muslim mourning. These studies collectively demonstrate that in pandemic rituals (1) Media are reflexive and enchanted; (2) The religious sensorium is sticky and lingers in embodied and mnemonic ways even under new circumstances of mediation; (3) Space and time emerge as modular, transposable, condensed, yet expanding. Ritual innovations can provoke new kinds of mediations, sensory engagements, and temporal-spatial arrangements, while revealing continuities with pre-pandemic cosmologies, theologies, liturgies, and social hierarchies, and relying on memories of previous ritual sensory experiences.

HTS Teologiese Studies / Theological Studies

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) first appeared in China in late 2019 and since then it has become a pandemic. Various countries, in accordance with their cultures, have adopted different approaches to deal with the spread of this disease. The dimensions of this disease and its global spread are such that it will certainly have enormous effects on various aspects of human life for many years. One of these issues is examining the approach of religious countries in dealing with this crisis. The issue of science and religion is one of the main issues in the philosophy of religion. A historical event that human society is struggling with today is the COVID-19 crisis. The issues of religion and science were intertwined during the COVID-19 outbreak, contrary to what some thought. This shows that the opposition between religion and science is not real but aims to attack religion without a valid reason. Given the importance of the subject, this article addresses two aspects of people’s e...

Faculty of Theology - University of Malta, 2021

ABSTRACT The scope of this study -- conducted by the academic members of staff of the Department of Pastoral Theology, Liturgy and Canon Law in the Faculty of Theology of the University of Malta -- was twofold: (a) to gather information about how people interpreted the Covid19 pandemic and the partial lockdown in Malta and (b) to reflect constructively on a global crisis which was difficult to understand and very hard to live. The questions in this survey were meant to gauge the personal experiences of the participants, how Covid19 impacted their sense of existential meaning, their faith, their sense of community and how they coped with the crisis. The study was held between 30 November and 21 December 2020. During this period, 1102 responses were recorded. LINK: http://www.um.edu.mt/theology/covid19