This session brings together four interdisciplinary papers that explore the ethical, spiritual, and cultural dimensions of health and embodiment across varied religious and sociopolitical landscapes. Moving beyond dominant biomedical narratives, the presenters engage grounded, community-based research to interrogate how religious worldviews, racialized structures, and reproductive norms shape lived experiences and moral claims. Together, these papers illuminate how moral knowledge is co-produced through narrative, ritual, and resistance—offering fresh ethical insights at the intersection of religion, medicine, healing, and bioethics.
This paper advocates a new ethical paradigm for seeking and creating public policy change to bolster individual freedom for millions of health seekers on Medicaid. Bioethicists should prioritize health agency over the principle of autonomy and engage in ethical work with communities who are consistently cast outside the public’s concern. Our mixed-methods, interdisciplinary, community-valued study of Indiana’s Medicaid Expansion, the Healthy Indiana Plan (HIP), examines the “administrative burdens” (Herd and Moynihan, 2018) produced by HIP’s personal responsibility incentives. We demonstrate how these burdens interact and compound each other, contributing to racial disparities in accessing comprehensive health benefits by Black and Latine HIP enrollees. The “alchemy of beauty and events” (Coates, 2024) in the co-production of moral knowledge of sacred values with community members propels our team’s actions for policy change and challenges the framework of health promotion and autonomy through personal responsibility as it resurges through Medicaid nationally.
Narratives experiences of persons who are purposedly childless have been missing from political and public pronatalist debates. This paper examines reproductive justice and faith by encouraging a liberatory lens that takes seriously the embodied experiences of childfree Black women. Through autoethnography, qualitative focus groups, and the theorizing of ethicists Nikki Young and Wylin Wilson, this paper illuminates the moral harms caused by the repeal of Roe potentially saddling Black women who desire to be childfree with unwanted pregnancies. Rejecting pronatalist arguments as limited constructs of family, my paper investigates how Black women make themselves over as participants in new familial structures that are not contingent upon reproduction, biology, and religious rhetoric. Ultimately, the paper interrogates the role of religion in supporting these Black women’s experience of reproductive freedom and suggests that this reproductive agency has ethical and political ramifications.
COVID-19 highlighted the diversity of Catholic experience in the US when some communities experienced disenfranchisement because of public health mandates and others actively supported these policies. What factors shape how Catholic parishes experienced stay-at-home and risk mitigation public policies, as well as how public health actors and the public perceived Catholics? To examine these questions, I engage secularism studies and narrative medicine to analyze 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork I completed with two different Catholic congregations. One congregation utilized a narrative framework very similar to public health professionals to interpret their pandemic experiences and engaged in risk mitigation efforts above and beyond what public health policy required. The other parish was traditional, practicing the Latin Mass, and did not narratively interpret COVID-19 similarly to public health actors. They experienced conflict and disenfranchisement. Public health actors discursively labeled the first church as “good religion” and the second as “bad belief.”
This paper examines how religious and secular worldviews shape attitudes toward Covid-19 public health measures, drawing on empirical data from a three-year research project in Switzerland. Using a comparative analysis of semi-structured interviews, it critiques essentialist views on religion and objectivist approaches to risk. The study employs concepts from worldviews research, vernacular religion, folklore studies, and medical humanities to explore the narrative construction of risk. Moving beyond individual-centered approaches, it integrates cultural analysis to highlight how worldviews interact within social contexts. The findings challenge a binary view of compliance and non-compliance, emphasizing that risk perception is shaped more by relational positioning than by worldview content. The paper argues for a more comprehensive analysis of both compliant and non-compliant attitudes to better understand their underlying social dynamics.