Interfaith Dialogue and Healthcare Diplomacy During COVID-19 and Beyond: Parameters, Opportunities, and Constraints

Abstract

Interfaith Dialogue and Healthcare Diplomacy During COVID-19 and BeyondParameters, Opportunities, and Constraints Nukhet A. Sandal (bio) In March 2020, right after the COVID-19 virus started to spread around the world, media outlets featured an article that showed a Jewish and Muslim paramedic in Beersheba, praying together during one of their very few breaks while responding to COVID patients. The article quickly became popular on social media as it displayed an uplifting example of interfaith co-existence at a very difficult time for healthcare workers. Zoher Abu Jama, the Muslim paramedic, said, “I believe that God will help us and we will get through this. We should all pray to God to get us through this, and we will get through this world crisis,” expressing a sentiment that his Jewish partner, Avraham Mintz, shared.1 The pandemic created a healthcare crisis with a high toll on physical and mental health. During these difficult times, daily partnerships among ordinary people from different faith traditions (like the one between Abu Jama and Mintz), as well as the initiatives that brought the religious leaders and organizations together with public health professionals, attracted attention. Partly inspired by the uptick in interfaith projects and communications during the pandemic, this article looks at instances and dynamics of interfaith cooperation and diplomacy to tackle the various health crises such COVID and HIV/AIDS. There are many issues that benefit from interfaith diplomacy, ranging from peacebuilding in conflict-laden areas to responses to pressing challenges like climate change. Health and healthcare have quickly climbed to the top of that list, especially given the strain the pandemic has put on resources and infrastructure around the world. In this article, I first provide a theoretical framework to account for the role of religious actors in healthcare. Then, I turn to investigating the platforms and dynamics of religious epistemic connections in health and healthcare within the context of interfaith initiatives and diplomacy, including recent examples involving responses to the pandemic. Interfaith initiatives are not without their challenges and [End Page 196] there are many questions about their future; the third section looks at those dimensions. religious actors as epistemic communities of health There is an established literature on religion and health.2 The literature on interfaith initiatives and diplomacy on healthcare, however, is still very limited. In a step toward filling this gap, I argue that faith-based actors—including religious leaders—constitute a distinct community of practice and expertise when it comes to health and healthcare. In other words, they are epistemic communities and can be described as networks “of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain or issue-area.”3 Epistemic communities constitute a subset of “communities of practice.”4 Adler gives diplomats “sharing a diplomatic culture, common values, and interests that are intrinsic to their practice” as an example of a community of practice, whereas Cross describes the European Diplomatic Corps as an “epistemic community.”5 In this article, similarly, I recognize that religious actors form communities of practice, yet also emphasize the importance of their expertise, competence, and knowledge production, situating them in the subcate-gory of epistemic communities. I use “epistemic communities” instead of “communities of practice” because the latter is implied in the former, but epistemic communities have a distinct dimension of knowledge production that not every community of practice has. The epistemic community framework has already been used to explain faith-based actors’ activities in areas other than health. I, for example, have argued elsewhere that religious actors are uniquely situated to make a change in a given situation due to their religious expertise, shared norms and understanding, as well as their standing in their communities, and these features qualify them as epistemic communities in conflict transformation.6 This article argues that religious actors can constitute critical epistemic communities in healthcare as well—especially when they collaborate with health professionals and engage in interfaith dialogue and diplomacy—for four main reasons. First, religious actors can speak to very specific values, texts, and interpretations. Hall, Koenig, and Meador describe religion as a cultural-linguistic system with its own approaches...