Religion Naturalized: The New Establishment

Negotiating Religious Differences: The Strategies of Interfaith Chaplains in Healthcare

“…Chaplains are the professionals in healthcare positioned to see how and where these religious differences are present and to respond. In so doing, their strategies provide further evidence for the idea that a “universal spirituality” or broader way of making meaning apart from explicitly religious traditions is emerging across institutional sectors (Sullivan ). The issue of whether the strategies chaplains are using are secularizing is an important one that scholars will need to investigate with evidence about how chaplains work in a broader range of sectors.…”

“…Isolated studies describe how hospitals attempt to accommodate members of particular—usually religious minority—groups, but few studies focus on how chaplains as religious professionals in healthcare manage religious differences in their work (Abu‐Ras and Laird ). While chaplains historically worked with people from their own religious backgrounds, increasing religious diversity in the United States and corresponding changes in chaplaincy as a profession led many chaplains to work as interfaith chaplains today engaging with people from a range of spiritual and religious backgrounds (Cadge ; Sullivan ).…”

“…In some secular organizations, including hospitals, prisons, and universities, it is chaplains who are formally responsible for addressing religious differences among staff and constituents. The history of chaplaincy varies by institutional sector though chaplains across sectors have been challenged to adapt their work to growing religious pluralism in recent years (Sullivan ). Universities and the military added their first Muslim and Hindu chaplains in recent years and many chaplains in other sectors regularly interact with people from a wider range of religious and spiritual backgrounds than they did in the past (Bergen ; Cadge ; Sullivan ).…”

“…The history of chaplaincy varies by institutional sector though chaplains across sectors have been challenged to adapt their work to growing religious pluralism in recent years (Sullivan ). Universities and the military added their first Muslim and Hindu chaplains in recent years and many chaplains in other sectors regularly interact with people from a wider range of religious and spiritual backgrounds than they did in the past (Bergen ; Cadge ; Sullivan ). In healthcare this has been formalized through the creation of interfaith chaplaincy positions and in the decisions some hospitals have made to change the names of their departments from chaplaincy or pastoral care—which point to the profession's Christian history—to departments of spirituality or spiritual care services, which they see as more inclusive and broadly welcoming to a wider range of people (Cadge )…”

Fortune Telling and American Religious Freedom

“…33 Further, he anticipated the naturalization of religion, a process by which individual spirituality and the category religion run together, increasingly prevalent within twenty-first-century American law and spurred by twentieth-century religious studies. 34 Rather than lump all spiritual activity together, though, Lee understood the utility of genealogical thinking about specific practices. In his analysis of Cooper v. Livingston, an 1883 case in which a Florida woman was convicted of fortune telling, Lee chided the court for failing to understand the history of the statute, which was based on English vagrancy laws and earlier witchcraft law.…”