ABSTRACT
In this, the book’s last chapter, we review the complex ways that religion has intersected with global health and development efforts with mixed results. In recounting various instances touched on earlier in the book, the chapter lays out the argument that the current research interest in religion, health, and development needs to more fully and critically examine religion’s varied effects on health and development programs and policies. The chapter also explores the idea that global health and development practice is an inherently tragic enterprise because at times, it places practitioners in the field in complex situations in which there is no option to carry out the good without also enabling negative consequences. The chapter argues that in such instances, the fields of public health and development studies are ill-equipped to examine the impact of our work because the primary criteria employed for determining whether a project is right are the good effects it produces. Thus, when a project also carried with it negative consequences, the fields are unsure what to do. The chapter asks whether one important and distinctive contribution that religion might make in such circumstances would be its ability to provide a history of the limitations of our efforts and the inescapable possibility of tragic outcomes.
