In many western societies health professionals play a powerful role in people's experiences of dying. Religious professionals, such as pastors, are also confronted with the issues surrounding death and dying in their work. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the ways in which death-related topics, such as euthanasia, are constructed in a given culture are affected by the views of these professionals. This qualitative study addresses the ways in which Finnish physicians and religious professionals perceive and describe euthanasia and conceptualises these descriptions and views as social representations. Almost all the physicians interviewed saw that euthanasia does not fit the role of a physician and anchored it to different kinds of risks such as the slippery slope. Most of the religious and world-view professionals also rejected euthanasia. In this group, euthanasia was rejected on the basis of a religious moral code that forbids killing. Only one of the religious professionals -the freethinker with an atheist worldview -accepted euthanasia and described it as a personal choice, as did the one physician interviewed who accepted it. The article shows how the social representations of euthanasia are used to protect professional identities and to justify their expert knowledge of death and dying.

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adoptée dans les années 1970 en Grande-Bretagne, au Canada, en Australie, en Allemagne et en Suède pour rendre hommage à la diversité ethnique et culturelle) dans le sens où il consacre les inégalités entre les sexes. D'autres chercheurs tels que Niamh Reilly (2011) et Teresa Toldy (2011,

The globalizing culture of health and wellbeing flourishes both asdemand and supply, posing multiple intriguing and critical questionsboth to the individuals who face distress and suffering and to thesurrounding society. In the spirit of vernacular religion, this articleenters the discussion of ‘de-differentiation’ between religion andhealth, focusing especially on the role of otherworldly relations thatmay become part of complementary and alternative medicine and careand its healing agency. I propose that engagement with otherworldlyrelations may be understood in terms of ‘possibility work’ in complexlife situations when conventional healthcare and therapy are apprehendedas insufficient for some reason, or alternatively unavailable.I draw on two distinct ethnographic projects to exemplify the argument:care of the dying and contemporary angel spirituality. Thesetwo examples demonstrate how intimate otherworldly relations maywork as important and powerful, albeit also ambivalent and sociallyvulnerable, non-secular possibility work in the face of various formsof anxiety, distress, and suffering in contemporary lives.

‘The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.’ This diagnosis of modern life, given by Gramsci, can be translated as pointing towards varying positions between secularity (even secularism), on the one hand, and (religious or pol­itical) belief and commitment on the other. This crossroads of belief and disbelief, or enchantment and disenchantment, is topical in new ways after recent revisions of secularization theories and the current revitalization of religions. Moreover, it also has bearings on how people bring together religions and bodies. The question examined in this article is: In what ways can diverse religious and spiritual practices bring about and construct new kinds of enchanted embodiments within contemporary life, and what is being done with these embodiments, both by people themselves and by scholars of religion. First, the author outlines a preliminary diagnosis of the current situation, which is approached as the desire for enchanted bodies. After that three ideal types of practices by which this desire could be seen to be enacted are tentatively identified. And finally, some implications of this diagnosis for the study of religion today are considered.