Confluences: Religion, Health, and Diversity in Missouri

At the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, the South and Midwest, the Ozarks and the Ouachita mountains, the plains and the prairies, America’s religions flow together and are remade. Bringing together experts in religious history, sociology, and medicine, Confluences: Religion, Health, and Diversity in Missouri shows that centuries before the first European colonists arrived at the confluence of the great rivers in what is now Missouri, the region’s indigenous inhabitants lived at the center of a transnational nexus for religious diversity and that, following the arrival of European settlers, religions have continuously shaped health and healing and informed Missouri’s regional identity.

The contributors to this volume explore connections between religious affiliation, race, gender, ethnicity, epidemiology, and attitudes towards health and medicine in Missouri from the nineteenth century to the present day. They ask what role religious belief systems play in healthcare outcomes and offer important arguments for building a dialogue between faith communities and medical caregivers. Centering on Missouri as a site for religious transformation and diversity, this volume documents how religious perspectives shape contemporary America.

Initial chapters outline the religious history of Missouri, relaying the history of medicine in the region before and after Missouri statehood. Subsequent essays document Missouri’s religious diversity by contemplating Native American, Asian American, and African American religious experiences in Missouri, intentionally recovering and respectfully contextualizing understudied events and forgotten individuals. The volume’s remaining essays consider religious responses to the Cholera, Influenza, and Covid-19 epidemics and show how Native American, Euro-American, and African American Missourians have transformed U.S. history and healthcare. Collectively, the essays in this book demonstrate that religious freedom, medical knowledge, and transnational encounters are woven into the historical fabric of the region.

Featuring essays by experts in Religious Studies and Health Sciences, this volume will be of interest to scholars of religion, sociology, public health, and medicine, as well as readers more generally interested in the history and culture of Missouri.

Signe Cohen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia whose research interests center on Hinduism and South Asian Buddhism. Trained as a Sanskritist, she works with original Hindu and Buddhist texts, both in Sanskrit and in other ancient Asian languages, such as Pali, Prakrits, Tibetan, and Tocharian. Though much of her work has focused on the classical Upaniṣads, a genre of Hindu philosophical and religious texts from around the 8th century BCE onwards, her secondary area of research concerns the nexus of ancient texts and modern pop culture. In addition to numerous scholarly articles, she is the author of two books, Textual Criticism and Sacred Texts: A Comparative Method and I, Yantra: Exploring Self and Selflessness in Ancient Indian Robot Tales.

Rabia Gregory is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her primary research interest is the history of Christianity in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, the study of which she approaches through book history, material culture, and theories of gender. Her first book, Marrying Jesus in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe: Popular Culture and Religious Reform, uses previously unpublished cultural artifacts to revise longstanding assumptions about religion, gender, and popular culture. She has also published on the relationship between religion, new media, and medieval culture in contemporary video games. She is currently preparing a critical introduction, biography, and facing-page edition and translation of the poetry of Anna Bijns (1493-1575).