Assessing the Need for and Interest in a Christian Framework for Peaceful Engagement with Socially Divisive Issues in Healthcare

This project aims to foster peaceable engagement with socially divisive issues in healthcare. Through a series of co-creation workshops, we will explore which divisive issues Christian pastors and healthcare professionals regularly encounter in their work, and how these issues arise. We will also conduct two survey studies to validate a measure of Social Engagement with Divisive Issues (SEDI). The SEDI will be used in future studies to examine what factors are associated with peaceable forms of engagement with divisive issues. We will make publicly available the data, survey measure, and scholarly papers that result from these activities. Finally, we will convene a research project planning meeting with a multidisciplinary team of scholars. This meeting will help us to generate a 3-year project grant proposal to the Templeton Religion Trust aimed at leveraging resources from Christianity and diverse disciplines to foster peaceable engagement with divisive issues in healthcare.