The Medicalization of the Sacred and the Sacralization of Care: Contemporary Perspectives on Religion, Spirituality and Medicine

1. Introduction

The study of the relationships among religion, spirituality and medicine is an important and expanding field of study, especially in the light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic, which stressed the need to support health care professionals, patients and their families in a time of exceptional social, healthcare and psychological disruption. The pandemic was accompanied by a deep, widespread sense of fear, isolation and existential uncertainty that—especially on the part of patients admitted to intensive care units and their families—gave rise to an unprecedented demand for holistic care focused not only on the body, but also on psychosocial and spiritual aspects. The pandemic, however, is just one of the many recent developments that highlight the often-overlooked intersections among religion, spirituality and medicine: from the integration of spiritual care into palliative and psychiatric treatments, to the rising popularity of alternative and complementary medicine and the resurgence of charismatic Pentecostalism with its focus on miraculous healing, these diverse yet intersecting practices call for close scrutiny by social scientists. In these overlapping domains, where health and salvation are profoundly entwined, regulated discourses and embodied experiences demand careful, critical attention.

As the sociologist of health Michael Bury (Bury [1997] 2006, p. 1) rightly notes, “Illness […] challenges our sense of security and may introduce acute anxiety into our life. At its extreme, illness threatens our very existence as individual beings […]. It is no wonder, therefore, that all societies mobilize cultural and material resources to deal with illness”. Recognizing this crucial insight, all contributions here presented engage directly with the complex ways in which religion, spirituality and medicine provide cultural, material and symbolic resources to confront illness and promote wellbeing, whether from within, alongside or at the margins of biomedical science and mainstream healthcare institutions.

In this Special Issue we have gathered both well-known and emerging social-science scholars from around the world to explore, discuss and unveil the intersections among religion, spirituality and medicine across geographical contexts (e.g., Australia, Canada, United States, Italy and India), fields of practice (e.g., nursing, complementary and alternative medicines, new spiritualities and bioethics) and through a plurality of methodological and theoretical perspectives (e.g., sociology, anthropology and theology). The aim of this collection is thus to inquire whether and how the practical-discursive universes of religion, spirituality and medicine overlap, blur and/or clash in specific social domains (e.g., public institutions, religious groups and the holistic milieux) and how social actors (e.g., hospital managements, health-care professionals, patients, religious leaders and spiritual seekers) navigate the porous boundaries among these disparate, yet overlapping, dimensions of life.

Sociologist Christopher G. Ellison and medical doctor Jeffrey S. Levin (Ellison and Levin 1998, p. 700) rightly observed that interest in the relationship between religion and health has grown significantly in recent years, both in popular culture (such as TV series, self-help books, and radio talk shows) and within academic communities across various disciplines. Although this interest has expanded even further over the 27 years since their work was first published, the intersections among religion, spirituality and medicine—complex categories that resist straightforward analysis—have been addressed primarily by scholars of nursing and medical sciences, with only a few notable exceptions, which will be explored in the following sections (Section 1.1 and Section 1.2). The rest of this editorial is structured as follows: Section 2 will briefly discuss the limits and potentials of current social scientific scholarship; Section 3 unpacks in more detail the complex, multilayered and changing relationships among religion, spirituality and medicine; Section 4 summarizes the contributions gathered in the Special Issue.

1.1. Nursing and Medical Sciences: A Brief Overview

The nursing and medical literature is primarily concerned with the study of the inclusion of spiritual interventions in hospital settings (e.g., Balboni and Peteet 2017; Harrad et al. 2019; Otis-Green 2015), especially in the context of palliative care (e.g., Gijsberts et al. 2019; Puchalski et al. 2020; Walter 2002). With the progressive development of this literature, however, other areas of practice and of research, such as the treatment of COVID-19 (e.g., Ferrell et al. 2020; Timmins et al. 2022; Papadopoulos et al. 2021), the provision of training in spiritual care (McSherry et al. 2020, 2021; van Leeuwen et al. 2020) and the role of religion and spirituality in psychological and psychiatric treatment (e.g., Culliford 2002; Neathery et al. 2020; Shamsi et al. 2022) have also been investigated.

Accounting for this literature as a “discursive formation” (Foucault 1972), that is, an ensemble of texts constituting—or contributing to the constitution of—a specific object of analysis, spirituality is represented as a fundamental component of an individual’s health and wellbeing (e.g., Lucchetti et al. 2019; Oman 2018; Timmins and Caldeira 2019) and is thus perceived as a crucial resource in the care process, with particular reference to dimensions pertaining to the sense of personal self and relationship with others, on the part of both patients and healthcare providers (Ho et al. 2016). In this regard, the Commission of Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, a globally operating institution, has formally endorsed the importance of spirituality in its policies regarding patients’ rights, including pastoral care and spiritual services as integral elements of care, showing how the nursing and medical knowledge is only one element of a broader nexus of discourses surrounding the growing interest for and legitimacy of spiritual care in healthcare contexts. To this end, social scientific approaches to the study of religion, spirituality and medicine, as we will clarify in the next section, allow for a more thorough understanding of spiritual care interventions as one instance of broader cultural shifts towards the medicalization of the sacred and—paradoxically—the sacralization of the therapeutic.

1.2. What Else? Social Scientific Approaches

The growing interest in the theme of spiritual care is not merely a driving force within nursing and the medical sciences. More broadly, this interest also regards part of disciplines as diverse as medical humanities, anthropology and sociology, whose main focus lies in the study of narrative medicine, patients’ and health professionals’ spiritual and religious needs, spiritual seekers’ searches for health and well-being as well as the governance of religious diversity in hospital settings (e.g., Ammerman 2021; Baccetto 2023; Cadge 2012; Collicutt 2022; Di Placido and Palmisano 2023, 2025; Enstedt and Plank 2023; Garrett 2002; Gilliat-Ray 2005; Giorgi et al. 2022; Griera and Martínez-Ariño 2022; Levin 2020, 2022; Lombi 2024; Lüddeckens et al. 2021; Martínez-Ariño and Griera 2018; McGuire 2008; Mol 2002; Shuval et al. 2012; Vanzo 2025).

A foundational work in the social scientific exploration of religion and health is Jonathan Imber’s (Imber 2008) Trusting Doctors, which traces how rapid medical advances, increasing specialization and the rise of a profit-driven healthcare industry have deeply strained doctor-patient relationships. Imber argues that these changes have contributed to a crisis of trust, placing physicians’ moral authority in jeopardy. Another crucial research is Wendy Cadge’s (Cadge 2012) Paging God, where the American sociologist draws on interviews and ethnographic observations in several U.S. hospitals to show that, despite the rationalization of medical practice, spirituality and faith remain embedded in the daily routines of nurses, doctors and chaplains. Cadge compellingly illustrates how the sacred continues to shape clinical life even in environments governed by science and standardized protocols, although spiritual care departments—often led by chaplains—often play only a marginal role in U.S. hospitals, navigating tensions between religion, medicine and institutional priorities. From a socio-historical perspective, Jeffrey Levin (Levin 2020) positions religion and medicine as two of the most enduring institutions in Western history, and in later work (2022) highlights how New Age-inspired notions of the sacred and well-being are increasingly entering mainstream healthcare through the spread of complementary therapies and spiritual care practices such as meditation, yoga and mindfulness. His thesis is also evident from the literature discussed in the previous section. What the social scientific studies reviewed share, we contend, is the acknowledgment that “health” and “salvation” are practically, symbolically and discursively entangled to the point that to fully—although this is analytically useful—distinguish between the two constitutes a violence towards our sociological understanding of the contemporary relationships among religion, spirituality and medicine, a point to which we shall return in the next sections.

2. Some Critical Observations on Current Research

Despite its pioneering role and its merits, the nursing and biomedical literature briefly discussed above relies on an a-historical and essentializing understanding of spirituality—an immutable essence that defines humans as such—without recognizing that “social discourses around spirituality and religion have commonalities” but also “differences across international contexts” (Pesut et al. 2008, p. 2804) and historical periods. As sociologist of religion Meredith McGuire (McGuire 2008, p. 12) persuasively argues, the social practices and the discourses of religion and spiritualities are “lived in a particular time and cultural setting” (McGuire 2008, p. 12) and as a consequence “religion [as well as spirituality] exists in a social context, is shaped by that social context, and, in turn, often influences it” (McGuire 1997, p. xiii). In other words, neither religion nor spirituality are monolithic constructs that can be easily pinned down, approached and operationalised as universal categories. Unfortunately, the dismissal of their contextual and historical dimensions—often overlooked by the contemporary nursing and medical literature—seems to do exactly that.

Furthermore, echoing several critiques from social scientific research on religion, spirituality and medicine, we argue that current conceptualizations of spirituality in healthcare literature and practice often reduce it to a substantial, individualized experience positioned in contrast to traditional religions. This simplified understanding stems largely from the disciplinary perspectives—primarily medicine, nursing and to some extent psychology and theology—that shape these dominating narratives and the literature of reference. It also reflects a broader lack of socio-historical awareness about the complex and layered nature of categories such as “religion” and “spirituality” (Toniol et al. 2023; Palmisano and Pannofino 2020; Watts 2020), as well as the semantic ambiguity of “spirituality” itself, which makes it especially vulnerable to diverse reinterpretations (Bramadat 2019). As a result, the scarcity of sociological inquiry into the relationships among religion, spirituality and medicine—next to a lack of specialized training in these areas—has allowed the field to be dominated by fragmented perspectives that often overlook the historical, discursive and practical dimensions of these intersections across different contexts and time periods.

Disciplinary divides—especially between sociologists of religion and sociologists of health—are bound to prevent us from conducting a thorough analysis of the current developments and internal articulation of the spiritual and religious field. As we have argued elsewhere:

“Health” is a pervasive register progressively colonizing even those segments of the social world traditionally concerned with, and regulated by, the salvific premises of the sacred. Yet a complete understanding of the current religious and spiritual panorama means that the therapeutic and medical fields must be taken into account by sociologists of religion. This, we contend, allows grasping the transformations, lines of continuity and the ruptures that today’s conceptions of the sacred owe to “health”, its cultivation and maintenance as one of the most seductive, malleable and symbolically rich forms of salvation available in contemporary societies.

(Di Placido et al. 2023, p. 178)

Consequently, this Special Issue advocates for the value of social scientific research on religion, spirituality and medicine as a means to complement—and enrich—the limitations of existing nursing and medical literature and practice. More specifically, besides recognizing the increasing overlaps between the cure of the body and that of the spirit, sociologists ought to understand the inclusion of religion and spirituality in healthcare settings in the light of the broader historical, discursive and practice processes that characterize their social construction and use within specific dispositifs, whether religious, political or therapeutic (Di Placido 2025). Here, the task of sociology is, in addition to understanding, that of critical reflection.

If sociology shies away from critical analysis of the inclusion of spirituality in healthcare contexts, it becomes complicit in an essentializing project with often confessional overtones. This, as shown elsewhere in reference to the Italian case (Di Placido 2025), implies that a country’s majority religion—such as Catholicism in Italy—has a profound—although often unproblematized—impact on the specific ways—often confessional—through which health and salvation are understood by healthcare institutions. The inclusion of spirituality in healthcare contexts also runs the risk of being instrumentalized by neoliberal care policies focused on personal responsibility (of the patient and hospital staff) and flanked by the progressive corporatization of care. For example, among the most widespread discursive and practical logics we find the use of spirituality—such as meditation—to mitigate the high rate of burnout among physicians and nurses (De Diego-Cordero et al. 2022), who are overburdened by workload and widespread staff shortages, as well as an emphasis on practices and interventions that focus on patient and health professional accountability rather than systemic and structural interventions (Fries 2008; Mavelli 2020; Lartey and Moon 2020).

We cannot, therefore, avoid considering the risk that such processes may lead religion and spirituality, as understood in healthcare settings, to take on the features of a veritable technology of disciplining that contributes to the creation of “docile bodies” (Foucault [1975] 1977), individuals whose value and social role are principally contextualized in relation to the economic imperatives of efficiency, productivity and work performance, rather than to the promotion of holistic, integrated and transformative care. However, these potential neoliberal drifts do not solely pertain to the inclusion of spirituality into healthcare contexts but are also at play in the broader spiritual, religious and therapeutic fields. As religious studies and yoga scholar Andrea Jain remarks (Jain 2020, p. 18), “the popularity of relaxation, self-improvement, self-care, and stress management technologies […] reflects the salience of models of subjectivity that prioritize the subject’s ability to respond and exercise control over their feelings in response to precariousness”. We thus agree with sociologist of religion Véronique Altglas (Altglas 2014, p. 282) when she states that, especially when coupled by a legitimizing narrative grounded in modern medicine and science:

Exotic religious resources are popularized as authentic and efficient means to manage emotions and attitudes, in relation to an increasingly pervasive ideal of self-realization. This ideal, while desired by social actors, also reflects increasingly strong demands of autonomy and flexibility made upon them. Thus, exotic religious resources, along with other religious and therapeutic techniques, contribute to the wider trend of the psychologization of contemporary social life.

In conclusion, in today’s societies specific conceptions of health, of the sacred and of the political-economic continuum compete to inform the legitimate culture of disparate fields, from medicine to religion and economics, where they intersect, overlap and reciprocally challenge or inform each other (Di Placido et al. 2022). As Halafoff et al. (2023, p. 244) note, “[t]his global engagement with spirituality has been accelerated by social media and also due to an interest in alternative frameworks for personal and planetary health and wellbeing”. Here, the traditional authority of both the clergy and the medical establishment is challenged by a democratization and pluralization of forms of knowledge where individuals’ subjective authority, access to the sacred and cultivation of health find their realization in practices of consumption where body care, spiritual seeking and material success often intertwine (Steensland et al. 2021). Following this analysis, these entanglements reveal how the “hybrid field” (Pedrini et al. 2020) under investigation resembles, in its internal articulation and practical discursive logics, that of a religious market (Gauthier and Martikainen 2013; Moberg and Martikainen 2018; Possamai 2018; Stoltz 2006) where competition over the consumption of—often symbolic—religious and spiritual resources focused on health and well-being nourishes flourishing industries as well as the broader capitalist apparatus (Carrette and King 2005).

3. Entanglements Among Religion, Spirituality and Medicine

The joint care of body and soul is essential in all religions and spiritual disciplines, and more implicitly, all healing practices, such as acupuncture, Ayurveda, and traditional medicines from many regions and cultures around the globe (Camassa 2016; Dericquebourg 2004; Filoramo 1999; Secondulfo 2009). Western medicine is the great exception in that its history is characterized, in its orthodox versions, by the radical opposition between scientific and spiritual/religious discourses, and consequently between standardized clinical intervention and the care of the soul (Sulmasy 2006; Valeri 2007). As Foucault shows, in his ‘Naissance de la Clinique’, in the new epistemological articulation of modernity, health and salvation are disjointed, leading to two main consequences: on the one hand, the growing legitimacy of the figure of the physician leads to outflanking and replacing that of the priest, thus colonizing the field of the sacred with expert knowledge based on science; on the other hand, “disease becomes detached from the metaphysics of evil to which, for centuries, it had belonged” (Foucault 1969, p. 222) to become an object of relevance and discursive value in and of itself within a new configuration of knowledge about the body (Dei 2004, p. 10). As Bury ([1997] 2006, p. 5) notes in reference to these processes, “[t]he growing influence of medicine demonstrated how science and rationality were becoming central to the construction of new forms of legitimate authority and social control in modern society”.

Despite these reconfigurations, however, the sacred never entirely disappeared nor was fully detached from the domain of health. As widely observed, the overlaps between spirituality and health has “simply” shifted from being embedded within traditional religious frameworks—next to popular beliefs and vernacular forms of knowledges—to flourishing within “new” and/or “alternative” spiritualities—characterized by their focus on bodily care, health maintenance and material self-fulfillment in this world, rather than on transcendent or otherworldly religious rewards (Burchardt 2020; Jain 2020; Mossière 2022). As an anthropologist of religion, Géraldine Mossière (Mossière 2023, p. 1) clarifies further, “[t]he current enthusiasm for spirituality as a popular narrative is generally attributed to contemporary religious reconfigurations generated by secularization processes and a certain disenchantment with religions considered authoritarian or institutions”. Amid this broader critique and overview of the field, it is nonetheless crucial to mention how secularization and a decline of adherence to traditional religions signified also the flourishing of a plurality of “new” and/or “alternative” forms of relationship with the sacred focussed on subjects’ internal authority, first-hand experience and the conflation of the horizons of health, transcendence and self-actualisation (e.g., Heelas 1996; Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Jain 2020).

Since the 1960s, despite the dominance of a medical model centered on the physician’s scientific expertise and detached from any sacred or spiritual dimension, we have witnessed a growing re-enchantment of the world—a renewed fascination with the sacred, expressed through a relationship with the divine that is experienced as both immanent and transcendent. This sacralizing vision of life, of nature, of the human body and of the “invisible” has also meant a progressive rapprochement of the practical-discursive universes of health and salvation.

Examples include the significance of holistic frameworks characteristic of “New Age,” “contemporary,” and “new spiritualities” (Mossière 2022; Palmisano and Pannofino 2020), the prominence of collective and miraculous healing practices within Pentecostal and charismatic revival movements (Althouse 2023; Csordas 1994; Schirripa 2012), and the growing appeal of so-called complementary and alternative therapies (CAM) and nonconventional medicines (MNCs), defined by their emergence outside—or at the margins of—Western biomedical paradigms (Brosnan et al. 2018; Gale 2014; Griera et al. 2025; Secondulfo 2009). It is in this broader—and multifarious—cultural context that “health and healing appear to be salient metaphors for salvation and holiness” (McGuire 1993, p. 144) and that, often simultaneously, health is progressively “seen as a spiritual force, to the point that it can be identified as a “state of grace”” (Giordan 2009, p. 231).

For instance, as human geographer Jennifer Lea (Lea 2019, p. 181) argues in her study of therapeutic massage as a form of body work, what characterizes these “new” and/or “alternative” spiritualities and/or conceptions of the health and salvation nexus is the notion of “energy” “[a]lso known by other names such as ‘ki’, ‘chi’ or ‘prana’, depending on the tradition drawn upon”. According to the energetic physiology of disciplines as diverse as yoga, Ayurveda, Thai massage and so on, “[w]hen energy lines become blocked, or the flow becomes stagnated, illness and suffering are understood to occur. Practices such as massage are seen to work on the energy lines to remove blockages, to re-establish free flow of energy, and to restore health” (Lea 2019, p. 182). Here, religious, spiritual and health registers reciprocally reinforce each other and contribute to accounting for both the care of the body and that of the soul in ways that still eschew social scientists’ interpretative frameworks.

What is perhaps most significant, from a sociological perspective, are the processes through which emerging (or re-emerging) conceptions of the body, health and the sacred become institutionalized. The study by Griera et al. (2025) explores precisely this dynamic, examining how spirituality and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) are integrated into the healthcare systems of Argentina and Spain. The authors ask whether these developments reflect a “scientification” of spirituality or, conversely, a “spiritualization” of biomedicine and drawing on a comparative qualitative approach, they show how spiritual practices are often legitimized through scientific discourse, while biomedical institutions increasingly incorporate symbolic and existential dimensions, especially in fields such as palliative care. The study, very much in line with the argument advanced in this editorial, reveals a broader process of hybridization between systems of knowledge and practice, shaped by specific institutional and cultural contexts, and argues for recognizing spirituality as a vital resource in healthcare beyond the conventional divide between science and religion.

Equally important, however, is also the sociological study of those portions of the (digital)social field where the overlapping practical-discursive logics of health and salvation interact with anti-establishment and conspiratory narratives. In recent years, scholars have begun to offer in-depth analyses of the so-called phenomenon of “conspirituality”, the fusion of New Age spirituality and conspiracy theories, which gained significant traction during the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, this literature reveals how certain spiritual and wellness communities have adopted conspiratorial narratives rooted in distrust of science, vaccines and democratic institutions. Halafoff et al. (2022), for instance, describe a “viral outbreak of conspirituality” that has transformed seemingly apolitical spaces into sites of radicalization, often aligning with far-right ideologies. Gerrand (2023) highlights how these communities promote an ideology of “militant wellness” grounded in purity, bodily autonomy and essentialized gender roles which intersect with supremacist and anti-government and/or authoritarian worldviews. Similarly, Griera et al. (2022) further show that in Spain, conspirituality has fueled anti-vaccine and anti-healthcare movements, with tangible consequences for public health. Taken together, these studies warn against trivializing the phenomenon, emphasizing that conspirituality is not merely an alternative form of spirituality but a potential vector of radicalization and misinformation with serious implications for both health and democracy, thus recalling, once again, the important critical role of the sociological trade.

4. Overview of the Contributions

The contributions which follow are inevitably a selection from a potentially very wide range of topics. They have been selected on the basis of their importance to the study of the intersections among religion, spirituality and medicine and their relevance to both the sociology of religion and spirituality and the sociology of health. The aim of this collection is to provide the reader with a critical review of the relevant literature, combined with an outline of the more recent trends and debates in these fields. We thus briefly introduce each article.

Nicola Pannofino, acknowledging that spirituality “can be a crucial resource to draw on to make sense of critical situations that mark a turning point in individual and collective biographies”, provides an analysis of spiritual illness narratives collected in Italy through qualitative interviews with oncological patients. Building on the notion of “latent spirituality” the author critically engages with the mainstream scholarship on religion and spirituality in healthcare settings arguing that spirituality, rather than representing a pre-existing resource at disposal of patients and professionals, is, on the contrary, “an emerging aspect along the therapeutic pathway and that it is transformed by reflecting the temporality of the biographical experience of illness”. Accordingly, latent forms of spirituality, both in the rediscovery of one’s one past religious affiliation or in the embracing of new secularized forms, display as a powerful analytic tool to unveil some undiscussed facets and lived experiences associated with the inclusion of spiritual interventions in healthcare contexts.

Antonio Camorrino delves deeper into the “health” and “salvation” nexus, a theme revised in our previous discussion of the field. The author makes the point that this nexus is best understood “if analyzed through the transformations that have affected the social relationship with the sacred in Western society”. As this piece clarifies, building on Berger’s and Weber’s sociology, these changes have important implications concerning the sphere of “ultimate meaning” and the weakening of legitimized “theodicies”. As the author adds, providing a useful grid through which to interpret the presence of health within the spiritual and religious field, the complexity of these transformations is mirrored in the different ways in which the “health” and “salvation” nexus can be declined: towards salvation in the case of Western religions; towards health in the case of medicine; and, in the case of new forms of spirituality “neither exactly towards health nor exactly towards salvation”, thus giving rise to an under-investigated hybrid.

Chris Miller and Lori Beaman, in turn, explore the social and discursive construction and the social imaginaries surrounding death, relying on focus groups and interviews with Death Café attendees in Canada. According to the authors, although traditional religious views have historically shaped visions of an afterlife—here the canon of every religious tradition is full of examples—in the light of the recent changes in the spiritual and religious field also “nonreligious lifestances have shifted how people understand death and dying”. In so doing, the authors offer what they call “four main typologies [although we believe types to be a more appropriate concept] of afterlife imaginaries”, that is, “cessation”, “unknown”, “energy”, and “transition”, each one revealing the emergence of a specific “immanent afterlife outlook” redesigning the boundaries of traditional religious conceptions of life, death and the afterlife.

In his article Jonathan Imber unveils some of the “enduring disagreements” that characterize bioethicists in the US around “the divide between secular and religious boundaries” and how they are reflected in “liberal, libertarian, and conservative approaches to medicine as a profession and vocation”. As the author shows, reconstructing the debate around the problem of suffering in bioethics in the second half of the twentieth-century US, specific rhetorical uses of suffering are representative of different—and often contrasting—perspectives regarding what ought to be the ethical foundations of medical practice.

Through a combined anthropological and philological lens, Maciej Karasinski explores how the sun-worship and healing practices of Samayācāra Śrīvidyā, a Hindu tantric tradition rooted in the Lalitāmbikā temple in Coimbatore, India, redefine conceptions of healing by employing solar meditations as a means of bodily rejuvenation and energetic revitalization. Underlying the multidimensional nature of tantric religiosity, the author clarifies that although these practices also have a healing and/or a preventive rationale against the insurgence of different ailments, their main goal is to reconnect the practitioner with the divine and thus dwell in the spiritual immortality it supposedly grants.

In the following article, Hannah Gould and Anna Halafoff identify and discuss a sub-current of the contemporary spiritual field, that is, a specific instance of lifestyle and deathstyle movements through which social actors cultivate what the authors call “relational naturalism” and exemplified by the phenomenon of “Girl mossing”. More precisely, while lifestyle is a common term both within and outside the social sciences—and as such requires little effort to be apprehended—deathstyle is a less known—as well as theorized—concept competently dealt with in the article. “Girl mossing” is thus defined by the authors “as a movement for women toward intentional unproductivity and rest in and through nature as a route to holistic wellness and health”. It is, on the grounds of its antithetical features to the current political-economic system, deployed as an antidote for both personal and planetary harm caused by neoliberal capitalism. More specifically, “natural temporalities of rest, (slow) growth, and even decay are deployed” by these movements “to subvert the rhythms and demands of fast-paced neoliberal, capitalist life”. As the authors illustrate through a figures-rich text, social media aesthetics and hashtag culture, despite their ephemeral and transient nature, are nonetheless the “latest expression of a larger evolving, and diverse politico-spiritual movement that focuses on nature-based activity as a route to wellness for young women”.

In their article on the intersection of biomedical knowledge and religious and spiritual representations within the hospital context, Denise Lombardi and Alessandro Gusman explore how these shared understandings are constructed and circulated within an Italian hospital. Through a focus on nurses and on their perspective on the interaction between spirituality and care in the hospital setting, their article contributes to filling a gap in anthropological and nursing research regarding the non-biomedical aspects of care in the Italian context where it is still largely unexplored. The article shows that amid the challenges that the spiritual dimension poses on both an organizational and practical level, social actors’ subjective spirituality is increasingly regarded as a constitutive element of the nursing profession.

In the last article of our collection, anthropologist Géraldine Mossière explores how energy and bodily movement contribute to experiences of well-being. The article, drawing on ethnographic research within the relatively new holistic approaches known as Core Energetics and 5Rhythms communities, examines how bodily practices—including dance, sensory awareness and somatic self-cultivation—generate energetic and restorative experiences of the self where ritual frameworks and intersubjective exercises have a foundational role in shaping these experiences. At last, the article engages in a discussion of the concept of “energy”, exploring its varied interpretations across different disciplinary and discursive frameworks.