ABSTRACT
The increasing cultural and religious diversity in modern globalized societies is posing a challenge for healthcare professionals to address and handle patients’ cultural expressions of religiosity, spirituality, and existential concerns. Ideals of secularization, characterizing the healthcare institution, generally make it difficult for healthcare providers to meet patients’ and their family's religious and spiritual needs. The lack of religious literacy and critical perspective of the concept of culture in healthcare has been singled out as an area that policymakers and practitioners should be reflecting on and working with. This introduction elaborates on these concepts and seeks to explore, challenge, and problematize them to contribute to a wider understanding than is common within healthcare. The stance in this volume is that culture and religion are about lived experience and meaning; how to provide for spiritual and existential dimensions of care consequently cannot be predicted but is a question of an ongoing dialog between the healthcare professional and the person suffering from ill-health. The introduction includes a presentation of the contributions to the volume with case studies from the Nordic countries, experiences and tensions in healthcare encounters, as well as suggestions for how to overcome religious illiteracy in healthcare.
