204 Michael McCullough and Timothy Smith
In this chapter, we have focused on a very thin slice of the religion-health field – the
possible causal associations between measures of religiousness and measures of health.
However, investigators have been asking a variety of other interesting questions for
many years, including questions about how religious holidays may postpone death for
days or even weeks, how religiousness may moderate the effects of testosterone upon the
initiation of coitus in adolescent females, and how approaching death may influence
people’s religious beliefs and behaviors, to name but a few. To readers who have enjoyed
the modest sampling of the religion-health literature that we have offered in the present
chapter, we might also recommend a broader sampling from the full menu.