What does it mean to name a disease, and what futures does that naming foreclose and enable? This panel examines how the boundary between religious and medical frameworks is drawn, contested, and navigated in healing traditions across historical and cultural contexts, and how those negotiations shape what futures become imaginable for the sick and those who care for them. Drawing on Tibetan medical and religious texts, qualitative interviews with Christians experiencing serious mental illness, ethnographic fieldwork on Vodou in South Florida, and analysis of Korean shamanism from missionary archives to contemporary popular culture, the papers gathered here argue that diagnosis is never merely descriptive. Together, these papers propose that the boundary between religious and medical healing is not a stable divide but a site of ongoing negotiation, one whose outcomes carry real consequences for those whose futures hang in the balance.
In Tibetan medical and religious texts, leprosy is understood as a type of “serpentine disease” (klu nad), a nosological category that links individual bodily affliction with the agency of serpent spirits and other inhabitants of the animated landscape. This paper examines diagnostic and prognostic techniques for serpentine disease in the Dialogue of the Serpent King and its exegetical tradition, arguing that this literature reveals not a unified healing system but a dialogical negotiation between religious and medical frameworks for anticipating the future course of disease. From the cold-water test for anesthetic “corpse flesh” to decade-long prognostic timelines, Tibetan physicians and ritual specialists developed remarkably precise methods for calibrating futures that neither ritual propitiation nor medicinal intervention could always alter. Incurability, in this literature, emerges not as a failure of medicine or religion but as a diagnosis produced at their intersection.
Healing does not unfold in a vacuum; it is narrated and negotiated by patients, clinicians, families, and communities who define distress, assign its significance, and imagine possible futures and modes of healing. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Christians experiencing bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, this paper argues that visions of healing are influenced and shaped as much by interpretive authority as by symptom profiles. Diagnostic labels can limit future possibilities, whereas recognition—being seen as a person rather than a problem—fosters dignity, belonging, and agency. Integrating lived experiences with narrative theory and a theology of naming, the paper shows how co-narration in care settings shapes future possibilities: the stories communities allow, repeat, and protect create the futures or modes of healing people can live into. The paper proposes a relational model of healing centred on interpretive humility, recognition and shared authority.
In this article, I examine how religious literacy, specifically in reference to Vodou and other African Diasporic religions, can be thoughtfully incorporated into biomedical pedagogy through the narrative medicine approach. Narrative medicine exists in a reciprocal relationship to self-reflection and listening while in addition building empathy. Given the importance of religion in human experience as well as the negative effects of religious racism, medical training should not be silent on the topic of religion. This silence can further marginalize patients who are likewise devotees of African Diaspora religions by effectively deferring the domain of religion to the ideologies of hegemonic religion. This is not a call to make healthcare providers ‘competent’ or ‘expert’ in non-hegemonic religions, but rather a call to provide them with basic religious literacy to develop understanding. With this effort, providers can be more effective listeners to patients’ religious experience which will facilitate more successful healthcare outcomes.
This paper takes Eliade’s Shamanism (1951) as a point of departure to examine accusatory and heuristic deployments of “shamanism” in Korean and global contexts. The paper examines uses that demonize indigenous religions as “demonolatry” and superstition and indict the theological orthodoxy of Pentecostal Christian churches, as well as efforts to resurrect the category in celebrating national heritage—most visibly in the 2025 film KPop Demon Hunters. Although critics charge traditional shamans and modern Pentecostals with materialism, both accusations reflect critics’ own materialistic assumptions and ambivalence about material prosperity, troubling the boundary between material and spiritual worlds. Even reclamations of shamanism as heritage risk reducing healing practices to commodified cultural resources. The paper concludes by gesturing toward a possible “Future” suggested by KPop Demon Hunters: the shaman as builder of community based on material, emotional, and spiritual reciprocity—challenging the assumption that shamanism must be defined by archaism rather than adaptability.