Review of “Prayer as Transgression?: The Social Relations of Prayer in Healthcare Settings”

Abstract

Reviewer: Wendy Cadge, Brandeis University, USA The essays that comprise this volume focus, in different ways, on what happens when prayer shows up in hospitals. The authors, who worked together on a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, conducted research in twenty-one hospitals, long-term care facilities, and community clinics in London and Vancouver. They interviewed and spent time with patients and staff in preoperative rooms, chapels, prayer rooms, and other settings seeing how prayer creates meaning and challenges biomedicine’s narrow focus on cure. The voices woven through the volume include those of scholars alongside indigenous elders, chaplains, patients, and staff members with widely diverse backgrounds. Deeply inter-disciplinary the authors represent and speak to concerns in health studies, sociology, religious studies, anthropology, theology, and chaplaincy studies. Relying on an understanding of transgression as the ability to go beyond boundaries, limits, and conventions, the authors explore the social functions of prayer and how the sacred disrupts the order of things. As outlined in the introduction, they identify prayer transgressing secular spaces; social differences of race, class, and gender; and ways of conceptualizing and relating to the metaphysical. They play with normative and interpretive questions about prayer as good or bad, connected to religion and/or spirituality, an individual and/or social act, and that which takes place in settings identified as religious and/or secular. Lived religious frames inform the work as do intersectional and reflexive frames central to feminist and critical theory.