Religion and Public Health during the Time of COVID-19

Dear Colleagues, 

Many dimensions of the recent COVID-19 pandemic and its amelioration have been well discussed in the literature—basic and applied scientific research, public health and public policy challenges, legal issues, the psycho-social dimensions of ongoing health risk and the treatment of the ill and dying, financial issues, fiscal policy, and national security issues. To date, however, there has been scant attention given to the thorny moral issues presented by COVID-19 in connection with the religious beliefs, mores, history, practices, and communal identity in assessing and evaluating responses to the pandemic. Our goal in this Special Issue of Religions is to address this gap in the literature, and to reveal how important—indeed, definitive—such beliefs and practices are (and should be) to stakeholders and policy makers, and to those afflicted by this pandemic. To this end, we propose to explore the ways in which such beliefs inform the analysis of these many dimensions of COVID-19, mentioned above. 

Proposed Timelines/Deadlines:

• February 2022—Call for invitations goes out, with deadline of May 1st, 2022 for authors to indicate their interest in submitting an article for the Special Issue.
• First week May 2022—Co-Editors select authors for the Special Issue and inform them.
• Final deadline for submission of articles—November 30th, 2022.
• December, 2022, Co-editors review submissions as well as send out submissions to reviewers for feedback.
• January 31st, 2023—Deadline for feedback from reviewers to authors.
• March 31st, 2023—Deadline for authors to attend to requests for revision and resubmit.
• April–June 2023—Editors review re-submissions.
• July 2023—Editorial office edits submissions and Publication appears on line.

Summary:

Aim

In this Special Issue we solicit articles which deal with a wide range of topics probing the interface between religion and the current pandemic through which we are living. We are seeking the treatment of a broad range of topics exploring areas in which religious issues bear on the lived experience and moral and public health implications of COVID-19.

Scope

Topics may include, but will not be limited to, treatments of religious freedom and the argument from autonomy; religious exemptions to vaccination requirements; social justice and the claims of the other (with regard to mitigation measures, vaccines, and public health policy); nationalism versus globalism in the context of pandemics generally; religions and their resources as a way of morally imagining solutions to crises precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic; religion, culture, and vaccine hesitancy and responses to vaccinate hesitancy that engage culturally sensitive messaging; religion and public health policy in the context of pandemics; COVID-19, religion, and the political zeitgeist; religion traditions and pandemic narratives.

Prof. Dr. Andrew Flescher
Prof. Dr. Joel Zimbelman
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.