The Clinical Issues

Major traditions of religion and spirituality have endured in large part because they have had something to say in response to the deepest questions in people s lives..... This volume is framed with the underlying assumption that religion and spiritual tradition can, at least for many people, shed light on our concrete situations, as well as make sense of our hopes and fears, our desires and decisions....... Most of us no longer live in cultures or spiritual traditions that are isolated from one another. We find ourselves in medical contexts, for example, where there may be already shared perspectives, values, and goals, but there may also be profoundly diverse worldviews, yielding divergent or convergent interpretations of illness, pain, or threats to physical and spiritual life. We have therefore come to realise the importance of understanding our own traditions, but not only our own. For it is in learning about other traditions that we may come to a better knowledge of our own; it is in understanding other traditions that we may come to better care for those who stand within them.