At the 2025 Interfaith Leadership Summit, IA network members joined StoryCorps One Small Step for 30-minute, one-on-one conversations across lines of difference. These kinds of conversations happen every day among students, co-workers, and family members in America, and the Summit is a space where participants can learn to seek them out with the purpose of respecting diverse identities, fostering meaningful relationships, and cooperating for the common good.
Listen to the full conversation to hear healthcare leaders Dr. Shaunesse’ Jacobs Plaisimond and Dr. Lavjay Butani discuss their religious and spiritual backgrounds, what inspired them to pursue work at the intersection of faith and health, the challenges and opportunities they face as educators.
Dr. Shaunesse’ Jacobs Plaisimond and Dr. Lavjay Butani want to help teach the next generation of doctors that faith is a key social determinant of health.
Both are educators and fellows in Interfaith America’s Faith in Health program, funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
“What makes me passionate about [this work] is recognizing how far medicine has drifted away from the humanistic aspect of care.”
“What makes me passionate about [this work],” said Dr. Butani, a pediatric nephrologist and medical educator at the University of California, Davis, “is recognizing how far medicine has drifted away from the humanistic aspect of care.”
Though he grew up in a secular household in India, Dr. Butani has found a sort of “magic alignment” at the intersection of religion, spirituality, and health in the years since his husband passed away.
“I felt that there was a vacuum, and that was a spiritual dimension of my life that I wanted to get better at — to grow in – and also realize that that was a dimension that I wanted to incorporate in my own practice,” he said, reflecting on the profound impact of a chaplain on his husband’s time in hospice care, which inspired him to pursue chaplaincy.
Dr. Jacobs Plaisimond feels a similar serendipitous connection to the work of interfaith cooperation in her career as a professor of religion and health at the University of South Florida.
“I find myself just naturally doing interfaith work in all that I do.”
“This is the second time I’ve just been naturally brought into this work,” she said, describing her involvement with Interfaith America now and during the COVID-19 pandemic, when she was an Interfaith America Racial Equity Media Fellow. “I find myself just naturally doing interfaith work in all that I do.”
Interfaith cooperation was cultivated in the rural Black Baptist church in northwest Louisiana, where Dr. Jacobs Plaisimond grew up.
“Despite this community being very Christian … there was this ethos that was far more pluralistic and interfaith than one would think,” she said. “I was taught to do that work as a little tike in church, and that’s what keeps me passionate about it. This idea that I’m carrying forward the work and the mindset and the love and acceptance of people that modeled it well when I was a child.”
As she teaches pre-med and pre-health students at the University of South Florida, Dr. Jacobs Plaisimond is encouraged by how the students have come to better understand and engage with the religious diversity in their own communities and are excited to carry those experiences with them as healthcare professionals.
She is hopeful about the growth in conversations around faith and health since she entered the field as a student.
Dr. Butani is also optimistic as colleagues and students at UC Davis are receptive to the work that bridges medicine and spirituality.
“I am just thrilled with the amount of excitement that has been generated and the people who have approached me to continue this work, and I’m gonna focus my attention on the people that actually want to carry this work further, with the hope that we can effect somewhat of a culture change over time,” he said.
Rachel Crowe
Rachel Crowe, Staff Writer for IA Today, tells compelling stories about interfaith cooperation across diverse communities and supports our narrative programming. She is a graduate of Gettysburg College where she earned a BA in English with a Writing Concentration and a German Studies minor.
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