University Times

To better understand the role of spiritual- ity and faith in health care, the Carter Center of Atlanta, Ga. has chosen Pitt's Graduate School of Public Health (GSPH) to join with four other institutions in a national Faith and Health Consortium.

With funding from the John Templeton Foundation, the Carter Center established the consortium this fall to help the five sites develop educational programs and teaching curricula, as well as to encourage research exploring the link between spirituality and public health.

As part of the Faith and Health Consortium, GSPH will strengthen its partnership with the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. Together, they will develop a new interdisciplinary course focused on faith and health. The course will be open to all public health and seminary students.

Ten years ago, the two institutions initiated a joint degree program that allows seminarians and GSPH students to earn a dual master's degree in health administration and divinity. Ten students have completed the degree.

GSPH Assistant Dean Yvette Lamb said her school had planned to expand its study of the role of faith in community health even before learning of the Carter Center project last spring. For the last three years, Lamb has been working with four African American churches in the East End, studying the churches' role in improving public health.

She declined to specify how much money the Carter Center will give GSPH, but said, "This doesn't involve a lot of front-end funding. The resources that the Carter Center is providing aren't as important to us as the fact that they are bringing this initiative together and allowing the Carter Center name to be used in connection with it." The center, founded by former President Jimmy Carter, promotes a variety of activities promoting spirituality in society.

Lamb emphasized that the Faith and Health Consortium will not promote or focus on any particular faith, or even organized religion per se. "It's an all-encompassing approach, the whole notion of spirituality and faith and the interplay between them and public health," she said. "This is not intended to be oriented to Western or Eastern religion, but rather to provide a forum where issues can be debated and ideas can be shared." Nor will the Pitt site be limited to GSPH, she said. "We may draw from all of the Health Sciences schools — and, for that matter, the whole University — in terms of faculty who are interested in developing this new interdisciplinary course and other courses looking at the interplay between faith and health." Physicians have always understood that a patient is more than just a biological entity, and public health professionals have long collaborated with churches to promote community medicine, Lamb said. "More recently, there has been an increased awareness of the interplay between the mind and body, and an acceptance of the fact that some health factors have validity even though we can't explain them empirically. But how do we find what that validity is, and how can it be measured? That's the kind of thing this consortium will study." Other Faith and Health Consortium sites are in Atlanta (Emory University, the Interdenominational Theological Center, Columbia Seminary and the Morehouse School of Medicine), Berkeley (the University of California-Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union), St. Louis (St. Louis University, Aquinas Institute, Concordia Seminary and Eden Seminary) and South Carolina (the University of South Carolina, the Lutheran Southern Theological Seminary and the South Carolina health department).

— Bruce Steele