Religion and Healing in America

Religion and Healing in America PDF Author: Linda L. Barnes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195167961
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
Americans have long been aware of the phenomenon loosely known as faith healing. During the 1990s the American cultural landscape changed and religious healing became a commonplace feature in our society. This is a look at this new reality.

Religion and Healing in America

Religion and Healing in America PDF Author: Linda L. Barnes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195167961
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
Americans have long been aware of the phenomenon loosely known as faith healing. During the 1990s the American cultural landscape changed and religious healing became a commonplace feature in our society. This is a look at this new reality.

Faith in the Great Physician

Faith in the Great Physician PDF Author: Heather D. Curtis
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421402017
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
This history of evangelical faith healing in nineteenth-century America examines the nation’s shifting attitudes about sickness, suffering, and health. Faith in the Great Physician tells the story of how participants in the divine healing movement transformed the ways Americans coped with physical affliction and pursued bodily wellbeing. Heather D. Curtis offers critical reflection on the theological, cultural, and social forces that come into play when one questions the purpose of suffering and the possibility of healing. Belief in divine healing ran counter to a deep-seated Christian ethic that linked physical suffering with spiritual holiness. By engaging in devotional disciplines and participating in social reform efforts, proponents of faith cure embraced a model of spiritual experience that endorsed active service, rather than passive endurance, as the proper Christian response to illness and pain. Emphasizing the centrality of religious practices to the enterprise of divine healing, Curtis sheds light on the relationship among Christian faith, medical science, and the changing meanings of suffering and healing in American culture. Recipient of the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History for 2007

Religion and Healing in Native America

Religion and Healing in Native America PDF Author: Suzanne J. Crawford O'Brien
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
What it means to be healthy or to heal is not universal from culture to culture, from religion to religion. Indeed, in many cultures religion and healing are intimately tied to each other. In Native American communities healing is conceived as the place where ideas about the body and selfhood are brought to light and expressed within healing traditions. Healing is defined as self-making, and illness as whatever compromises one's ability to be oneself. This book explores religion and healing in Native America, emphasizing the lived experience of indigenous religious practices and their role in health and healing. Indigenous traditions of healing in North America emphasize that the healthy self is defined by its relationship with its human, spiritual, and ecological communities. Here, Crawford brings together first-hand accounts, personal experience, and narrative observations of Native American religion and healing to present a richly textured portrait of the intersection of tradition, cultural revival, spirituality, ceremony, and healing. These are not descriptions of traditions isolated from their historical, cultural, and social context, but intimately located within the communities from which they come. These portraits range from discussions of pre-colonial healing traditions to examples where traditional approaches exist along with other cultural traditions-both Native and non-native. At the heart of all the essays is a concern for the ways in which diverse Native communities have understood what it means to be healthy, and the role of spirituality in achieving wellness. Readers will come away with a better understanding not just of religion and healing in Native American communities, but of Native American communities in general, and how they live their lives on an everyday basis.

Christian Science on Trial

Christian Science on Trial PDF Author: Rennie B. Schoepflin
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801877679
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
In Christian Science on Trial, historian Rennie B. Schoepflin shows how Christian Science healing became a viable alternative to medicine at the end of the nineteenth century. Christian Scientists did not simply evangelize for their religious beliefs; they engaged in a healing business that offered a therapeutic alternative to many patients for whom medicine had proven unsatisfactory. Tracing the evolution of Christian Science during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Christian Science on Trial illuminates the movement's struggle for existence against the efforts of organized American medicine to curtail its activities. Physicians exhibited an anxiety and tenacity to trivialize and control Christian Scientists which indicates a lack of confidence among the turn-of-the-century medical profession about who controlled American health care. The limited authority of the medical community becomes even clearer through Schoepflin's examination of the pitched battles fought by physicians and Christian Scientists in America's courtrooms and legislative halls over the legality of Christian Science healing. While the issues of medical licensing, the meaning of medical practice, and the supposed right of Americans to therapeutic choice dominated early debates, later confrontations saw the legal issues shift to matters of contagious disease, public safety, and children's rights. Throughout, Christian Scientists revealed their ambiguous status as medical practitioners and religious healers. The 1920s witnessed an unsteady truce between American medicine and Christian Science. The ambivalence of many Americans about the practice of religious healing persisted, however. In Christian Science on Trial we gain a helpful historical context for understanding late–twentieth-century public debates over children's rights, parental responsibility, and the authority of modern medicine.

Prayer, Faith, and Healing

Prayer, Faith, and Healing PDF Author: Kenneth Winston Caine
Publisher: Rodale
ISBN: 9781579542658
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
Collects the thoughts of pastors, counselors, doctors, and health researchers on the efficacy and practice of prayer

The Healing of America

The Healing of America PDF Author: T. R. Reid
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143118218
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
A New York Times Bestseller, with an updated explanation of the 2010 Health Reform Bill "Important and powerful . . . a rich tour of health care around the world." —Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times Bringing to bear his talent for explaining complex issues in a clear, engaging way, New York Times bestselling author T. R. Reid visits industrialized democracies around the world--France, Britain, Germany, Japan, and beyond--to provide a revelatory tour of successful, affordable universal health care systems. Now updated with new statistics and a plain-English explanation of the 2010 health care reform bill, The Healing of America is required reading for all those hoping to understand the state of health care in our country, and around the world. T. R. Reid's latest book, A Fine Mess: A Global Quest for a Simpler, Fairer, and More Efficient Tax System, is also available from Penguin Press.

The Healing Power of the Santuario de Chimayó

The Healing Power of the Santuario de Chimayó PDF Author: Brett Hendrickson
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479855553
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Winner, 2018 Paul J. Foik Award for Best Book on Catholic History in the American Southwest, presented by the Texas Catholic Historical Society The remarkable history of the Santuario de Chimayó, the church whose world-renowned healing powers have drawn visitors to its steps for centuries. Nestled in a valley at the feet of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico, the Santuario de Chimayó has been called the most important Catholic pilgrimage site in America. To experience the Santuario’s miraculous healing dirt, pilgrims and visitors first walk into the cool, adobe church, proceeding up an aisle to the altar with its magnificent crucifix. They then turn left to enter a low-slung room filled with cast-off crutches, a statue of the Santo Niño de Atocha, and photos of thousands of people who have been prayed for in the exact spot they are standing. An adjacent room, stark by contrast, contains little but a hole in the floor, known as the pocito. From this well in the earth, the Santuario’s half a million annual visitors gather handfuls of holy dirt, celebrated for two hundred years for its purported healing properties. The book tells the fascinating stories of the Pueblo and Nuevomexicano Catholic origins of the site and the building of the church, the eventual transfer of the property to the Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe, and the modern pilgrimage of believers alongside thousands of tourists. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as fieldwork in Chimayó, Brett Hendrickson examines the claims that various constituencies have made on the Santuario, its stories, dirt, ritual life, commercial value, and aesthetic character. The importance of the story of the Santuario de Chimayó goes well beyond its sacred dirt, to illuminate the role of Southwestern Hispanics and Catholics in American religious history and identity. The healing powers and marvel of the Santuario shine through the pages of Hendrickson’s book, allowing readers of all kinds to feel like they have stepped inside an institution in American and religious history.

The Healing Gods

The Healing Gods PDF Author: Candy Brown
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199985782
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
This book tells the surprising story of how complementary and alternative medicine, CAM, entered biomedical and evangelical Christian mainstreams despite its roots in non-Christian religions and the lack of scientific evidence of its efficacy and safety.

Ritual Healing in Suburban America

Ritual Healing in Suburban America PDF Author: Meredith B. McGuire
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813513133
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
Many Americans believe that people who practice folk healing are uneducated and too poor to afford conventional medical care. Contrary to this popular belief, Meredith McGuire finds that a large number of college-educated, middle-class suburbanites participate in a variety of nonmedical healing groups. In suburban New Jersey, people practice such diverse alternatives as psychic healing, New Age therapies, naturopathy, Christian Science, Transcendental Meditation, reflexology, acupuncture, yoga, Jain meditation, Therapeutic Touch, reflexology, shiatsu, rebirthing, and occult therapies. McGuire places these various healing groups into broader categories according to their traditional sources of inspiration and their beliefs about healing power. She then looks at the participants' diverse ideas about health and illness. By locating alternative healing in the context of these beliefs, she shows the many ways the adherents experience ritual healing. -- From publisher's description.

Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America

Biomedicine and Alternative Healing Systems in America PDF Author: Hans A. Baer
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299166946
Category : Alternative medicine
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Examining medical pluralism in the United States from the Revolutionary War period through the end of the twentieth century, Hans Baer brings together in one convenient reference a vast array of information on healing systems as diverse as Christian Science, osteopathy, acupuncture, Santeria, southern Appalachian herbalism, evangelical faith healing, and Navajo healing. In a country where the dominant paradigm of biomedicine (medical schools, research hospitals, clinics staffed by M.D.s and R.N.s) has been long established and supported by laws and regulations, the continuing appeal of other medical systems and subsystems bears careful consideration. Distinctions of class, Baer emphasizes, as well as differences in race, ethnicity, and gender, are fundamental to the diversity of beliefs, techniques, and social organizations represented in the phenomenon of medical pluralism. Baer traces the simultaneous emergence in the nineteenth century of formalized biomedicine and of homeopathy, botanic medicine, hydropathy, Christian Science, osteopathy, and chiropractic. He examines present-day osteopathic medicine as a system parallel to biomedicine with an emphasis on primary care; chiropractic, naturopathy, and acupuncture as professionalized heterodox medical systems; homeopathy, herbalism, bodywork, and lay midwifery in the context of the holistic health movement; Anglo-American religious healing; and folk medical systems, particularly among racial and ethnic minorities. In closing he focuses on the persistence of folk medical systems among working-class Americans and considers the growing interest of biomedical physicians, pharmaceutical and healthcare corporations, and government in the holistic health movement