H-Sci-Med-Tech: New posted content
Mohr on Cohen and Gregory, 'Confluences: Religion, Health, and Diversity in Missouri' [Review]
Cohen, Signe; Gregory, Rabia. Confluences: Religion, Health, and Diversity in Missouri. : University of Missouri Press, 2025. xix + 274 pp. ISBN 9780826223258.
Reviewed by
Adam Mohr (University of Pennsylvania)
Published on
H-Sci-Med-Tech (January, 2026)
Commissioned by
Penelope K. Hardy (University of Wisconsin-La Crosse)
Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=62376
As a lifelong East Coaster, with all my East Coast biases, I was a little shocked that there is a book out in the world about religion, race, and health in Missouri. The framing of this wonderful, edited collection could not have been better summarized by the title, Confluences, to discuss the intersection of religion, race, and health in Missouri in a series of essays in part 1, followed by a few essays about religion and race in Missouri in part 2, which was capped by the very powerful article by Tessi Muskrat, called “Seeking the Sacred in St. Joseph Museums: A Basket Made by Small Hands.” The title of this volume, too, refers to the place of Missouri in the United States as a veritable crossroads of people, religious communities, and ideas. In the first paragraph of the introduction, Signe Cohen and Rabia Gregory write, “America’s religions flow together and are remade in Missouri” (p. 3). The book's essays are about both past and present, and particularly about how the past influences the present.
Part 1 of this edited book begins with a chapter by Cohen about successive waves of cholera epidemics in Missouri in the nineteenth century, when religious communities often interpreted the disease as divine punishment. This is followed by chapter 2, by John Schmalzbauer, about the 1918 influenza pandemic in Missouri and the ways in which religious health care institutions shaped the public response, drawing very interesting parallels to the COVID-19 pandemic, with such actions as closing public spaces and masking mandates. This makes chapter 2 a very nice transition into chapter 3, about Christianity and COVID-19 in Missouri by Gregory, which examines the tension between religious liberties and public health restrictions on public gatherings, in particular religious gatherings. Gregory found that the pandemic intensified some preexisting tensions between Christian fundamentalists and more secular-leaning communities. The final chapter in part 1 is titled “The Black Church and Addressing Cancer Disparities through Genetic Risk Assessment Software Technology.” This chapter discusses the role of religious communities in healthcare as they tackle a certain healthcare disparity, such as cancer within the African American community of Missouri.
Part 2 of Confluences switches gears to looking at race and religion in Missouri, without explicitly addressing issues of health or healthcare. Chapter 5, “The Marian Days Festival and Ethnic Identity Formation,” written by Cameron Fenton, argues that Carthage, Missouri, which hosts a Catholic festival every year, plays a vital role in the identity formation of first- and second-generation Vietnamese Americans, for whom the Pilgrim Statue of the Virgin Mary comes to articulate a new, postimmigration identity. Chapter 6, by Rachel Brekhus, analyzes the many meanings of a majority-white Catholic high school in central Missouri, which adopts the name of the first African American priest in the US, Father Augustus Tolton. This chapter analyzes the many visual representations of Father Tolton as well as the school’s curriculum and strategic plans, including those involving racial justice, which are informed by Father Tolton’s life. Finally, chapter 7, written by Muskrat, discusses a display of Native American artifacts in a museum in St. Joseph, Missouri, but then homes in on a small basket made by an unnamed Native American child at the Crow Agency boarding school, located on the Crow Reservation in Montana and run by agents of the federal government in collaboration with various Christian churches. This chapter highlights the terrible suffering of Native American children torn away from their families and sent to highly abusive institutions in which religion, language, and culture were extinguished from these children. In a situation similar to eugenic institutions known as farm colonies, Indigenous children were forced to perform manual labor used to finance their schools, which included creating handcrafts such the woven basket displayed in the museum.
Altogether, this collection covers a lot of ground in relation to religion, health, and race in the state of Missouri. It describes those who shaped and continue to shape our understandings of the sacred, transcending simple disciplinary boundaries. It is a collection that should be widely read by scholars of religion, medical historians, Americanists, and anyone interested in the intersection of religion, health, and race.
Citation:
Adam Mohr.
Review of
Cohen, Signe; Gregory, Rabia.
Confluences: Religion, Health, and Diversity in Missouri.
H-Sci-Med-Tech, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2026.
URL:
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=62376
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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