The watershed of life: a river runs through it

The disciplines of public health and religion, we argue, need to make two shifts: first, abandon the simplistic “upstream/downstream” metaphor for a more complex metaphor of the “watershed” that accounts for all that impacts on health; second, reorient away from a preoccupation with risks or pathologies (“death”) towards generative leading causes of life. This requires embracing complexity at social scale in addressing the “health of the public”—health for all and for the whole—and a “public faith” that, in supporting basic public health (e.g., food security), also acts with appropriate respect towards the highest ends of which we are capable. The key is to interrogate the full social ecology of complex living human systems, which operate on life logic and extend to planetary health, while providing the necessary fertile ground for theogenerative practitioners who cross disciplines as well as institutional and other boundaries in support of life itself.