Once again this issue brings readers perspectives on the intersections of social work and religion and spirituality from across the globe. We strive to bring a diversity of voices and scholarship beyond the Western perspective. In fact, over half of the manuscripts in this issue come from outside the global North exploring social work concerns in Vietnam, Iran, Zimbabwe, and India. Publishing this research is essential to the understanding of social work practice, social issues, and innovative research in countries that are typically marginalized in publications (Baikady & Sajid, Citation2020). If we truly believe that the role of social work is to empower people to find their own solutions to the problems they face, then we must decolonize social work knowledge, and shine a light on local scholars’ work (Lutz et al., Citation2017).
The first manuscript in this issue is Religio-political influence on social work practice in contemporary India by G. Augustine Lordu, J. Peter Saleth Nathan, and Ramu Gokula Krishnan. The authors explore an essential question – “Can social work disentangle itself from religion and religio-political influence, or should a new narrative be developed within social work practice to address these concepts?” The second comes from Noel Garikai Muridzo and colleagues Samuel Lisenga Simbine and Robert Kudakwashe Chigangaidze who explore Some religious, myths, beliefs, and cultural dispositions as contributors to child sexual abuse in Zimbabwe. They utilize a qualitative methodology to take a closer look at the legal frameworks that guide child protection laws to try to create some understanding of why Zimbabwe has a high occurrence of child sexual abuse.
Bridging the gap between spirituality and mental health: the need for trauma-informed ministries within Latino communities by Vianette Hernandez is the third article in this issue and explores the intersections of culture, religion, spirituality, mental health, and trauma. Educating ministers and other religious leaders about trauma-informed practices is especially crucial when working with communities where there are stigmas surrounding seeking mental health care. We saw this need in an acute way during the COVID-19 pandemic, and our fourth manuscript, The relationship between spiritual health and quality of life and their affecting factors during the COVID-19 pandemic in Iranian families: a web-based survey by Niloofar Dadashi-Tonkaboni, Zeinab Gholamnia-Shirvani, Alireza Jafari, and Nooshin Peyman, explores just that. The authors designed a web-based descriptive cross-sectional study responded to by 362 Iranian residents. Their research explores spiritual well being in a time of great adversity.
Next, Ngoc N. Nguyen, John Paulson and Marie Opatrny Pease provide us with their research Examining the relationships between religiosity and e-cigarette smoking and alcohol drinking among college students in Vietnam. Drawing on a sample of 263 college students, 18 to 24 years old, from a private urban university, they explore the relationships between Buddhist religious beliefs and practices and alcohol and e-cigarette use. Their study adds to a nascent area of inquiry regarding religion and the use of electronic cigarettes (Hill et al., Citation2022). Our fifth article in this issue, Experiences of leaving “high-cost” religious groups and the concept of the “biographical trajectory:” relevance for social work by Ines W. Jindra, Jenna Thompson, and Nicholas Evans, uses a theoretical interpretive framework to explore the experiences of three people who were part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) or the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
The last manuscript in this issue, From the bottom to the sublime spirituality in the recovery process from PTSD by Tuly Flint PhD and Natti Ronel, explores spirituality as the mechanism of recovery from PTSD. While much has been written about religion and spirituality as both protective and risk factors, Tully & Ronel provide a model for a spiritually-based approach to recovery from trauma that contains four phases and three turning points. This issue ends with a book review from our Book Review Editor, Barbara P. Early. She provides a thought provoking review of God, evil, and suffering in Islam by Salih Sayilgan. Having read Dr. Early’s review, I will be reading this book, and hope you find it just as compelling.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
References
- Baikady, R., & Sajid, S. M. (2020). Researching social work in the global South: Implications for education. In S. S. M. et al. (Ed.), The Palgrave handbook of global social work education (pp. 484–508). Palgrave Macmillan.
- Hill, T. D., Bostean, G., Upenieks, L., Bartkowski, J. P., Ellison, C. G., & Burdette, A. M. (2022). (Un)holy smokes? Religion and traditional and e-cigarette use in the United States. Journal of Religion and Health, 63(2), 1334–1359. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-022-01721-3
- Lutz, R., Sachau Inkje, K., & Stauss, A. (2017). Border thinking in social work: The role of indigenous knowledge in the development of relations between the global North and the global South. Transnational Social Review, 7(2), 188–205. https://doi.org/10.1080/21931674.2017.1328908