**Preface**

It has been well over a year and a half since we began discussions on the potential publication of a series of journal articles around the topic of the encounter between religious practice and COVID-19. After significant effort and wonderful collaborations across many miles, months, and continents, we have finally completed the project. Many dimensions of the recent COVID-19 pandemic and its amelioration have been discussed in the literature—basic and applied scientific research, public health and public policy challenges, legal issues, the psycho-social dimensions of ongoing health risk and the treatment of the ill and dying, financial issues, fiscal policy, and national security issues. To date, however, there has been scant attention given to the thorny moral issues presented by COVID-19 in connection with the religious beliefs, mores, history, practices, and communal identity in assessing and evaluating responses to the pandemic. Our goal in this Special Issue of *Religions* was to address this gap and to reveal how important—indeed, definitive—such beliefs and practices are (and should be) to stakeholders and policy makers, and to those afflicted by this pandemic.

The collection of essays in the Special Issue includes treatments of religious freedom and the argument from autonomy; religious exemptions to vaccination requirements; social justice and the claims of the other (with regard to mitigation measures, vaccines, and public health policy); nationalism versus globalism in the context of pandemics generally; the impact of colonialism on developing regions of the world; and the adjudication of the debate over the extent to which religious insiders should be permitted to speak in their own voices and act independently within the context of the larger state. All of these essays examine the appropriate balance that we should strive to maintain between individual liberty and population health and flourishing. They probe the extent to which religious practices in a variety of cultures stood as impediments to implementing public health measures, while, at the same time, serving as resources for morally imagining solutions to crises precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. These essays may be said to reflect "pandemic narratives," that is, idiosyncratic accounts of how various sub-populations across the globe have striven to process the challenges and a new world order that the pandemic brought about.

In an undertaking this ambitious and far-reaching there are many to thank without whom we would not have had the tenacity to see this project through to its timely completion. We are grateful to a cohort at Stony Brook University who in the summer of 2020 began the "Pandemic Narratives Project" to study the impact of illness on human communities and explore global pandemics as objects of historical and contemporary concern. Our goal in that initiative was to inquire how we might access perspectives traditionally muted during health crises while paying particular attention to the lived experience of vulnerable groups. Our method was to integrate new insights from the STEM fields, humanities, and social sciences into an interdisciplinary whole. Special thanks go to Lisa Diedrich, Nancy Tomes, Karen Lloyd, and Susan Scheckel for their ongoing innovation and constant inspiration. Diana Cates, a mentor and wonderful colleague, helped us to navigate the labor-intensive task of editing, providing enormously valuable advice for how to bring forth with clarity and power disparate authorial voices. We would like to acknowledge and express gratitude towards Rachel Foxman for providing a poignant and an original image which adequately captured the two intersecting spheres that constitute the subject of our Special Issue: religion and public health. We would finally like to thank Moira Li and the expert and professional team at MDPI who helped us to develop the original idea for the Special Issue and encouraged us through the early conceptual stages right to the end of the project.

We have never been part of such a large, collaborative endeavor that drew from such a diverse group of scholars, but also that drew from experts on at least four continents. We could not have pulled off this project but for the ability of our authors to recognize the potential that such a publication could have and their willingness to contribute their time, energy, enthusiasm, creativity, and intellectual imagination to tackling these issues. Both of us are forever in their debt.
