The Covid-19 outbreak was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) on 11 March 2020. It had initially spread in Wuhan, China in late 2019, before the first cases outside the country were recorded at the beginning of 2020. Today there are millions of cases of Covid-19 globally, with thousands of new cases being confirmed every day. The Covid-19 pandemic is, at root, a public health emergency, driven by its ready transmission and ability to cause severe illness and death. But while its ability to overwhelm the best of health systems has already been demonstrated, its far-reaching social, economic and political consequences are still unfolding. Although everyone is at risk of the virus, some groups have been worse affected by the pandemic and its consequences, including in particular minorities and indigenous peoples. Especially in the global north, mounting evidence has shown that ethnic, racial and religious minorities are not only at greater risk of contracting the virus for a wide range of reasons – from their disproportionate employment in high-risk sectors such as nursing, cleaning and public transport to their concentration in overcrowded housing where social distancing is more difficult – but can also face higher rates of mortality once infected, often due to limited access to medical care. Linguistic minorities may face problems in accessing accurate public health advice. While there is so far less data available on the impact of the pandemic on indigenous peoples, particularly smaller or more isolated communities, emerging evidence from the US and elsewhere suggests that the implications of the pandemic have been ‘disproportionately devastating’ for indigenous peoples.

Believers from a variety of faith communities were asked to assess how the Covid pandemic has affected their faith. The anthology collects their responses to key questions, such as: · How does your faith explain why such events occur? · How has it affected your religious practices? · What changes has it necessitated? · What differences might we expect once the pandemic is over? · What have we learned from it? Two exponents of each major religion and a number of minority faiths comment on these issues, combined with a concluding essay by the editors assessing the overall impact of the pandemic on religion worldwide. Faiths explored include Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Shinto, Sikh Baha'i, Jain, African Traditional Religion, Zoroastrian, Unitarian, Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Science.

How religion reacted to the pandemic and how the virus and government policy affected religion in America

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus global health crisis, state restrictive provisions imposed to restrain or at least limit the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, have had an overwhelming impact not only on our daily lives but also on the exercise of religious freedom, which has suffered unprecedented restrictions. With the expertise of academics and legal scholars of different jurisdictions, this book analyzes the impact of COVID-19 restrictions on the exercise of religious freedom in different legal contexts and investigates how the pandemic crisis emphasized underlying judicial, political, social, cultural, ethnic, and economic challenges, giving rise to a clash between competing rights and exacerbating the tension between public, religiously neutral policies and claims for religious accommodation. Experts from different legal fields examine distinctive legal responses to the health crisis in terms of restrictions to the exercise of religious freedom, even in a comparative perspective; reactions of religious groups, in terms of opposition or cooperation, and the ability of religious leaders to provide guidance and support to their faith communities; the specific impact of restrictions on some religious communities; and the increase in religious discrimination against disliked faith-communities in specific geographical contexts.

"The primary aim of this book is to examine the ways in which aspects of religion and spirituality are linked to emotional attachment processes and close relationships. My approach is heavily influenced by John Bowlby's attachment theory and the enormous amount of research it has generated in developmental, social, and clinical psychology. A major aim of this book is to demonstrate the utility of approaching religion and spirituality from the perspective of a mainstream theory in developmental, social, and clinical psychology. This book will educate readers who are not yet familiar with attachment theory and the attachment-theoretical approach to religion and spirituality"--

This volume brings together diverse disciplinary perspectives to provide a multidisciplinary and multidimensional account of Muslim ethics operating in the COVID-19 era, where scriptural values, lived experiences, societal structures, and cultural contexts combine in fresh and diverse ways. Indeed, Islamic ethical evaluation often ignores contributions from the social sciences, and contextual factors are not fully understood when issuing Islamic edicts. This volume thus aims at a more connected account of how religious concerns generated challenges and how Muslims lived out their religious values during the pandemic. Alongside descriptive accounts are normative evaluations, and insights from interviews are connected with survey analyses; in this way, the chapters render a more complete account of the intersectional engagement of Muslim healthcare professionals and community members living in minority contexts with the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.