The Interfaith America Faith & Health Grant is shaping the future of Santa Clara University across multiple academic fields, putting the school in the global health conversation. Awarded to Santa Clara University in 2024, the grant was given to fund projects blending faith and health.

Religious studies professor Jaime Wright says the grant “gave us some funding to do the things that we’re passionate about, things we want to study, and also to strengthen a network of other faculty on campus who are also working at this intersection of faith and health.”

Wright serves as one of the principal investigators for the grant, meaning he applied for the grant and organizes what the grant now funds.

“When I say faith in health, both are defined very broadly,” says Wright. “So faith can be something like official religion, something like Catholicism or Buddhism, it could be someone’s spirituality, it could be frameworks for meaning, or groups that function to bring people together. And then when we talk about health, we’re not just talking about clinical settings. We’re also talking about mental health, and we’re also talking about public health.”

The grant funds events on campus—the latest is a viewing of the 2025 film “The Chaplain and the Doctor,” directed by Jessica Zitter, slated for Oct. 20 at the Recital Hall in the Music and Dance Building. The documentary highlights a real world example of how chaplains and doctors can collaborate in the medical field.

Psychology professor Thomas Plante, another principal investigator of the grant, shared that the documentary showing will be followed by a remote Q&A session with people highlighted in the film.

The grant has also given the University money to bring speakers onto campus and into classrooms, specifically for talks about faith and health related subjects.

“In terms of bringing people on campus, some of these speakers have just come to people’s classes,” says Wright. “Some have been opened up to kind of a broader faculty and students on campus. But we’ve had community health activists come speak, we’ve had a spiritual care minister speak.”

The grant has also helped fund the development of new classes within the intersection of faith and health, such as “Religion, Spirituality, and Global Health,” “Sacred Nature: Indigenous Relations with the Earth,” and the graduate class “Suffering and Human Flourishing: Moral and Pastoral Reflections.”

These new or revised classes are intended to assist University students in exploring the unique spaces surrounding the place of religion in the world of healthcare, and vice versa.

Beyond the classroom, the grant funds research done by professors such as Plante, who’s currently running a study to test if prayer reflection improves mental health among struggling patients. Comparing a group with secular treatments, the prayer group and a control group, the study is one of the first of its kind, but not the last. Expanding to the global stage, the research group is conducting a similar study at a drug and treatment facility in Mexico.

“A lot of people know about yoga. They may or may not care that it comes from Hinduism,” Plante said, describing the study. “This could be the next yoga. It could be something that could be used in a spiritual, religious way, or it could be used in a secular way. But we think it can be quite effective to help people with a variety of issues, and so we’re trying to do a variety of studies to demonstrate that.”

The intersection of faith and health has held a unique place in society— historically areas of overlap have been present in many cultures, but the concept is more commonly overlooked in the modern day. As a Jesuit institution, Santa Clara University has a unique position with the potential to create new ways of integrating faith in the professional medical world.

Classics professor and third principal investigator Daniel Turkeltaub believes the grant is very important at this moment in history.

“People have different ideas about the role of health and medicine in their lives, about their relationship between health and religion, between their own relationship with their faith traditions,” said Turkeltaub. “And so one thing that the grant supports the medical humanities minor doing is trying to give students who may be interested in future careers in healthcare a stronger background in not just cultural awareness, but cultural sensitivity.”

“We’re really kind of in an interesting place to begin thinking about health more holistically,” Wright believes. “We should really be taking the whole person into consideration, and I think that our grant helps to create a foundation for that kind of work that’s already being done on campus.”

The Interfaith America Faith & Health grant was awarded to University before the public announcement of the new Mark and Mary Stevens School of Medicine. Now, with the development of the medical school, as well as the movement of the Jesuit School of Theology from Berkeley to the Santa Clara University campus, the intersection of faith and health at the University has become more relevant than ever.

“This gives us an added opportunity to establish a reputation for being concerned with healthcare in a more serious way, for integrating the University mission with an University identity with the healthcare education that it provides,” Turkletaub said.

Plante conveyed high hopes for the trajectory of the University following the recent developments, remarking that it’s “a great time to be a Bronco.”

“We have a very unique opportunity to be really leaders, you know, nationally and globally, on some of these issues,” said Plante. “And the pieces are all coming together to help us do so. We’re in Silicon Valley. We’re gonna get a medical school. We have the Jesuit School of Theology. There’s a lot of things coming together that can put Santa Clara really up the forefront, which I think is terrific for our students, for our faculty, really for the world.”