The Pluralism Project at Harvard University

Dr. Linda Barnes

Spirituality and Child Health Initiative
Boston Medical Center
The Boston Healing Landscape Project

Inspired by the Pluralism Project developed by Diana L. Eck at Harvard University to study and document the growing religious diversity of the United States, the Boston Healing Landscape Project, located in the Department of Pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine, represents a complementary sister initiative to examine how, over the past thirty years, the medical landscape of the U.S. has changed in equally radical ways. This new landscape comprises the culturally diverse versions of religiously grounded approaches to healing now represented in our own cities and neighborhoods. Our initial focus will be the African Diaspora communities of Boston. These groups include African immigrant, African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Brazilian families. Eventually, we plan to expand the project to address the other cultural communities in Boston.

A richly textured world of healing now confronts the medical community with the critical challenge of shaping a positive response to the multiple approaches to religiously-based, complementary and alternative therapies being pursued by their patients. Through a collaborative effort between Boston University School of Medicine and Harvard University, the Boston Healing Landscape Project proposes to document some of these changes by beginning to map the new demography of religiously-rooted approaches to healing in African Diaspora groups, with Boston as its field site. Using race, gender, culture, and class as primary categories of analysis, our goal will be to foreground the religious realities and related approaches to healing that have generally been marginal not only within the broader religious traditions but also within the biomedical community. We will also study how many of these traditions are changing, as they take root in American soil and develop in a new context, and will explore how their presence is transforming our understanding of medicine and healing in the United States.

What we learn will be integrated into medical education across the curriculum at Boston University School of Medicine, with the objective of beginning a process of transforming physician self-understanding and the patient-doctor relationship. We will also explore possibilities for a parallel integration at Harvard Medical School. Our work represents the unprecedented introduction of a highly focused approach to the study of world religions into the training of physicians. Our data will also be disseminated to broader public arenas through a website, reports to the communities being studied, national conferences, and published work, where it will also exercise an influence among scholars of religion, medical anthropology, and public health.