scholarly journals “Whatsoever You Do unto the Least of My Brethren, You Do unto Me:” Using the Assessment of Spirituality and Religious Sentiments (ASPIRES) Scale in a Socially and Economically Marginalized Rescue Mission Sample

Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 474
Author(s):  
Ralph L. Piedmont ◽  
Jesse Fox ◽  
Evan Copello
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Development ◽  
Religious Involvement ◽  
Rescue Mission ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Economically Marginalized ◽  
The World ◽  
Faith Based Organizations ◽  
Religiosity And Spirituality ◽  
Religious Crisis

Homelessness is a continual problem around the world, leaving many organizations uncertain of how to serve these individuals. Although 60-percent of homeless are being served by faith-based organizations, religiosity and spirituality have been largely ignored by researchers as a way of treatment. In this study, we looked at 121 men who were admitted to a Christian-based rescue mission. The mission offered programs such as NA/AA and Spiritual Development. Those that agreed to participate in the study filled out the survey after the first 7-days of treatment, and again after 3 months. Our results revealed that due to the program, there was an overall increase in Religious Involvement, and a significant decrease in Religious Crisis. It is evident that religious and spiritual counsel is vital to improving the lives of those who are economically marginalized, and to ignore this is to not treat these individuals holistically.

scholarly journals Role of Religious Practices in the Spread and Mitigation of COVID-19

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (04) ◽  
pp. 235-238
Author(s):  
Simarpreet V. Sandhu ◽  
Hardas S. Sandhu
Keyword(s):  
Social Indicators ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
World Health ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
The World ◽  
Faith Based Organizations ◽  
Novel Coronavirus

AbstractThe World Health Organization (WHO) declared novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as a global pandemic on March 11, 2020 which engulfed the world like wild fire in less than 2 months. It has played havoc with the lives of people restricting their movement, confining them to their homes for months, devastating the economy, and causing psychological issues in some of them. In the unprecedented threat of the COVID-19 pandemic and its devastating impact on communities and nations across the globe, religious leaders and faith-based organizations may play a crucial role in saving lives and mitigating the spread of the disease. Religious leaders and faith-based organizations are primary source of support, comfort, guidance, direct health care and social service, for the communities they serve and people who have staunch belief in them. Most of the religious-minded people visit their places of worship frequently and often join the congregations on special occasions, making them vulnerable to any infectious disease prevailing at that time. Ensuring awareness and dispelling pseudoscientific practices is a necessity for such communities in India to contain and control the coronavirus infection, as it presents unique threat owing to the geographical vastness and the complexity of its cultural and religious diversity, beliefs, and practices coexisting with poor social indicators in this country. A study was conducted to understand the role of religious practices in the spread and mitigation of COVID-19.

scholarly journals The Role of Faith-Based Organizations and Faith Leaders in the 2014-2016 Ebola Epidemic in Liberia

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-78
Author(s):  
Perry Jansen
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic Of Congo ◽  
Republic Of Congo ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Faith Leaders ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The World ◽  
Faith Based Organizations

Since the time of Christ, caring for the sick and the poor has been a core distinctive of authentic Christianity.  The response of Christians during many of the great plagues of antiquity played an important role in the spread of Christianity.  In modern history, response to epidemics have been professionalized and, to a certain extent, secularized.  The 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak in West Africa offers an important illustration of the role that faith leaders and faith-based organizations still play in providing a trusted link between communities and international relief workers.  In late 2018, the world was faced with another outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  It is vital to build upon the lessons of prior epidemics as we support local efforts to prepare for, detect and respond to inevitable future outbreaks.

Assessing Organizational Factors in Faith-based Organizations Partnering in Health Promotion Interventions

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin K. Tagai ◽  
Cheryl L. Holt ◽  
Mary Ann Scheirer ◽  
Sherie Lou Z. Santos ◽  
Nancy Atkinson ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Health Promotion ◽  
Organizational Factors ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Faith Based Organizations ◽  
Health Promotion Interventions

The quantitative and qualitative contributions of faith based organizations to healthcare: The Kenya case

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 60-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alfredo Fort
Keyword(s):  
Health Facility ◽  
Management Practices ◽  
Developing World ◽  
Weighted Average ◽  
Relative Strength ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
Faith Based Organizations ◽  
The Government

Though difficult to ascertain because faith based organizations (FBOs) might keep a low profile, be confused with other non-governmental organizations (NGOs), or survey respondents may not know the nature of facilities attended to, these organizations have a long presence in teaching health personnel and delivering health services in many rural and remote populations in the developing world. It is argued that their large networks, logistics agreements with governments, and mission-driven stance brings them closer to the communities they serve, and their services believed of higher quality than average. Kenya has a long history of established FBOs substantial recent health investment by the government. We aimed to find the quantitative and qualitative contributions of FBOs by analyzing two recent data sources: the live web-based nationwide Master Health Facility List, and the 2010 nationwide Service Provision Assessment (SPA) survey. Using this information, we found that FBOs contribute to 11% of all health facilities’ presence in the country, doubling to 23% of all available beds, indicating their relative strength in owning mid-level hospitals around the country. We also constructed an index of readiness as a weighted average from services offered, good management practices and availability of medicines and commodities for 17 items assessed during the SPA survey. We found that FBOs topped the list of managing authorities, with 70 percent of health facility readiness, followed closely by the government at 69 percent, NGOs at 61 percent and lastly a distant private for profit sector at 50 percent. These results seem to indicate that FBOs continue to contribute to an important proportion of health care coverage in Kenya, and that they do so with a relatively high quality of care among all actors. It would be of interest to replicate the analysis with similar databases for other countries in the developing world.

scholarly journals The challenges of donor engagement with faith-based organizations in Cameroon’s health sector: a qualitative study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sibylle Herzig van Wees ◽  
Michael Jennings
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Health Outcomes ◽  
International Development ◽  
Health Sector ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
The Past ◽  
Faith Based Organizations ◽  
The Government ◽  
Depth Interviews

Abstract Substantial global advocacy efforts have been made over the past decade to encourage partnerships and funding of faith-based organizations in international development programmes in efforts to improve social and health outcomes. Whilst there is a wealth of knowledge on religion and development, including its controversies, less attention has been payed to the role that donors might play. The aim of this study was to describe and analyse the engagement between donors and faith-based organizations in Cameroon’s health sector, following the implementation of the Cameroon Health Sector Partnership Strategy (2012). Forty-six in-depth interviews were conducted in selected regions in Cameroon. The findings show that global advocacy efforts to increase partnerships with faith-based organizations have created a space for increasing donor engagement of faith-based organizations following the implementation of the strategy. However, the policy was perceived as top down as it did not take into account some of the existing challenges. The policy arguably accentuated some of the existing tensions between the government and faith-based organizations, fed faith-controversies and complicated the health system landscape. Moreover, it provided donors with a framework for haphazard engagement with faith-based organizations. As such, putting the implications of donor engagement with FBOs on the research map acknowledges the limitations of efforts to collaborate with faith-based organizations and brings to the surface still-remaining blinkers and limited assumptions in donor definitions of faith-based organizations and in ways of collaborating with them.

Translating religion and development: Emerging perspectives from critical ethnographies of faith-based organizations

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 243-263
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Bolotta ◽  
Catherine Scheer ◽  
R. Michael Feener
Keyword(s):  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
Faith Based ◽  
Governmental Organizations ◽  
Non Governmental Organizations ◽  
National University ◽  
Faith Based Organizations ◽  
Henry Luce

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, there has been a remarkable surge of interest among both policy makers and academics on religion and its engagements with development. Within this context, ‘religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs)’ or ‘faith-based organizations’ (FBOs) have garnered considerable attention. Early attempts to understand FBOs often took the form of typological mapping exercises, the cumulative effect of which has been the construction of a field of ‘RNGOs’ that can be analysed as distinct from—and possibly put into the service of—the work of purportedly secular development actors. However, such typologies imply problematic distinctions between over-determined imaginations of separate spheres of ‘religion’ and ‘development’. In this article, we innovatively extend the potential of ethnographic approaches highlighting aspects of ‘brokerage’ and ‘translation’ to FBOs and identify new, productive tensions of convergent analysis. These, we argue, provide original possibilities of comparison and meta-analysis to explore contemporary entanglements of religion and development. This article was written as part of a broader research project on Religion and NGOs in Asia. We are grateful to the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Henry Luce Foundation for their generous support of this research. We would also like to thank Philip Fountain and other members of the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute for stimulating conversations that have informed our thinking in this article, and the anonymous reviewers for PIDS who have helped us to improve on earlier drafts.

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