Contemporary practices of religion and spirituality have been greatly affected lately by socio-economic and political crises, a healthcare crisis, as well as transnational flows and globalized influences within the European context and beyond. Such challenges have influenced significantly the boundaries of contemporary religiosity and well-being and have shifted their horizons. Furthermore, practices of contemporary religiosity and CAM (complementary and alternative medicine and healing) have become pertinent during the last decades, especially at the level of vernacular and lived religion (Primiano 1995; Bowman and Valk 2012; McGuire 2008). When it comes to the study of religious phenomena and behaviours, southern European societies have been mainly studied through the prism of their dominant religious and healthcare institutions, for example, Orthodox Christianity in Greece, and Catholicism in Portugal and Spain, and biomedicine, equivalently, among others.

This conference, organised in the context of the research project Religion, Spirituality and Well-being. A Comparative Approach of Transreligiosity and Crisis in Southern Europe (ReSpell, https://doi.org/10.54499/2022.01229.PTDC), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), wishes to create an academic opportunity to explore contemporary practices of religious and spiritual phenomena, in direct relation to wellbeing and healing, especially in southern European societies; practices that go beyond the aforementioned monopolizing themes, do not limit themselves to the institutional, based on conventions and purifications of orthodoxy and orthopraxis, but go beyond the dogma and towards alternative manifestations of the sacred, the spiritual, or the metaphysical.

We welcome ethnographic contributions by anthropologists, social scientists but also researchers from other academic fields that enter in direct dialogue with the themes of our project, namely with the study of religion, spirituality, wellbeing and CAM healing, in the context of ‘crises’ (socio-economic, COVID-19, migratory, war, environmental or other). We aim to create a rich intercultural dialogue and advance the project’s concept of ‘transreligiosity’, which points to the transnationalization, creativity and elasticity of religio-spiritual and therapeutic frontiers and explore how these cut across and transcend stereotypical etic and emic categories and transform religious, spiritual, medical, sociocultural identities (Roussou and Panagiotopoulos 2023; Panagiotopoulos and Roussou 2022).

For example, what forms of elasticity and fluidity emerge in different religious and therapeutic contexts?What kind of politics of care and wellbeing are involved in those religio-spiritual practices that go beyond the merely institutional and open themselves to alternative paths? Which are the ethnographic strategies embraced to cope with our research on religion, spirituality and wellbeing? Are there any methods we need to re-adapt and adopt in order to study crisis? In what ways can we be anthropologically creative in studying contemporary religiosity and religio-spiritual belonging? What do we, as researchers, need to do or shift, to produce those ethnographic narratives that best capture the transreligious flux in times of crisis?