For decades, religion was effectively ignored by practitioners
and researchers concerned with development and humanitarian aid
– secularist biases in conceptualising development combined with
essentialist conceptions of religion as inherently conservative
and reactionary left no room for religion. In fact, religion
was, according to the sociologist Kurt Alan ver Beek (2000), ‘a
development taboo’. He had scanned three of the most prominent
journals on development and humanitarian aid in the period 1982
to 1998, finding only few references to the topic and no single
articles in which religion was the main topic. In the same
study, he also reviewed the policies of a number of major
development agencies and NGOs, concluding that none of them had
any policies on religion or spirituality. However, in recent
years, the taboo has been broken. In fact, some would even say
that religion has become fashionable. Religion is on the agenda
of several major donors and NGOs, just like an increasing number
of researchers hav