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01-06-2015 | Original Paper

Religion as an Empowerment Context in the Narrative of Women with Breast Cancer

Authors: Ahmad Kalateh Sadati, Kamran Bagheri Lankarani, Vahid Gharibi, Mahmood Exiri Fard, Najmeh Ebrahimzadeh, Sedigeh Tahmasebi

Published in: Journal of Religion and Health | Issue 3/2015

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This paper aims at exploring women’s meaningful perception, semantic understanding, and their experiences of breast cancer in a religion context. Accordingly, eight women who had one of their breasts completely removed by surgery (mastectomy) were studied by narrative interviews. In this narrative interview, participants told their life stories since the beginning of disease. Findings showed that religious concepts have a heightened role in the interpretation and understanding of disease, coping strategies, and gaining new concepts for life and death. Two main themes discovered in this research were fatalism on the one hand, and the hope and empowerment on the other. Despite the intrinsic conflict between these two concepts, religion, as a specific cultural and epistemological context, reconciles them; in a way, these polar concepts form a unitary structure of meaning and activity. In this structure, semantic coherence and concrete experience leads women with breast cancer to a new meaningful system, which shapes a new path for living well.

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Title: Religion as an Empowerment Context in the Narrative of Women with Breast Cancer
Authors: Ahmad Kalateh Sadati
Kamran Bagheri Lankarani
Vahid Gharibi
Mahmood Exiri Fard
Najmeh Ebrahimzadeh
Sedigeh Tahmasebi
Publication date: 01-06-2015
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Journal of Religion and Health / Issue 3/2015
Print ISSN: 0022-4197
Electronic ISSN: 1573-6571
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-014-9907-2

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Religion as an Empowerment Context in the Narrative of Women with Breast Cancer

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