ARHAP, South Africa (newsletter April 2008)
Professor James R. Cochrane held an interesting speech at the conference Transforming Development, where he shared with us his experiences of ARHAP, the African Religious Health Assets Programme. He was so generous to send us a speech from 2006, in which he deliberates the role of religion in Health services. He says:
"Religions, or religious traditions or worldviews, most often issue in a diversity of functions and structures that can readily be identified-through the way in which they organize sacred spaces, construct ritual performances, identify leadership, or create institutions, and so on. Where such functions and structures are turned directly to the promotion of health or the healing of illness and disease, it is relatively easy to identify what we have called religious health assets (although this is far from saying that the actual identification of such things in Africa is known in any systematic way, or at all, in itself a challenge to be met).
But many religious health assets have to do not with visible institutions, structures or organizations-say, religious hospitals, clinics, dispensaries, hospices, care groups, and so on-but with invisible or intangible realities that nevertheless make a big difference in the way health is perceived, pursued and maintained.
One initial way of capturing this complex reality that we have provisionally adopted is by viewing different kinds of religious realities in relation to their health impact within a heuristic matrix of religious health assets, an array of tangible organizational assets as well as intangible assets with both direct and indirect health affects."
You can read the entire document here.
