Jump to ContentJump to Main Navigation
Religion and Healing in America - Oxford Scholarship Online
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content.

Religion and Healing in America

Linda L. Barnes and Susan S. Sered

Abstract

Throughout much of the modern era, faith healing received attention only when it came into conflict with biomedical practice. During the 1990s, however, American culture changed dramatically and religious healing became a commonplace feature of the country's society. Increasing numbers of mainstream churches and synagogues began to hold held “healing services” and “healing circles”. The use of complementary and alternative therapies—some connected with spiritual or religious traditions—became widespread, and the growing hospice movement drew attention to the spiritual aspects of medical care. ... More

Keywords: faith healing, biomedical practice, religious healing, churches, synagogues, healing, complementary therapies, alternative therapies, hospice, medical care

Bibliographic Information

Print publication date: 2004 Print ISBN-13: 9780195167962
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: October 2011 DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195167962.001.0001

Authors

Affiliations are at time of print publication.

Linda L. Barnes, editor
Boston University School of Medicine

Susan S. Sered, editor
Bar Ilan University

Show Summary Details

subscribe or login to access all content.

Contents

View:

Front Matter

Title Pages

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Religion and Healing in America

Introduction

Susan S. Sered, and Linda L. Barnes

Part I Sites of Healing: Domestic Spaces, Public Spaces

1 The Cult of the Saints and the Reimagination of the Space and Time of Sickness in Twentieth-Century American Catholicism

Robert A. Orsi

2 The “Spiritual Healing Project”: A Study of the Meaning of Spiritual Healing in the United Church of Christ

Bobbie Mckay, and Lewis A. Musil

3 Ritual and Magic: Two Diverse Approaches to Inner Healing in the Cambodian American Community

Thomas J. Douglas, and Sophon Mam

4 Procreating Women and Religion: The Politics of Spirituality, Healing, and Childbirth in America

Pamela Klassen

5 Healing into Wholeness in the Episcopal Church

Jennifer L. Hollis

6 Miraculous Migrants to the City of Angels: Perceptions of El Santo Niño de Atocha and San Simón as Sources of Health and Healing

Patrick A. Polk, Michael Owen Jones, Claudia J. Hernández, and Reyna C. Ronelli

Part II Healing from Structural Violence: La Cultura Cura

7 “God Made a Miracle in My Life”: Latino Pentecostal Healing in the Borderlands

Gastón Espinosa

8 The Gathering of Traditions: The Reciprocal Alliance of History, Ecology, Health, and Community among the Contemporary Chumash

Julianne Cordero

9 Religious Healing among War-Traumatized African Immigrants

John M. Janzen, Adrien Ngudiankama, and Melissa Filippi-Franz

10: Making Wanga: Reality Constructions and the Magical Manipulation of Power

Karen McCarthy Brown

11 “Our Work Is Change for the Sake of Justice”: Hope Community, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Mary Farrell Bednarowski

12 Communing with the Dead: Spiritual and Cultural Healing in Chicano/a Communities

Lara Medina

13: Spirituality and Aging in the San Francisco Japanese Community

Ronald Y. Nakasone

Part III Gendering of Suffering and Healing

14 Healing as Resistance: Reflections upon New Forms of American Jewish Healing

Susan S. Sered

15: Healing in Feminist Wicca

Grove Harris

16 Sexual Healing: Self-Help and Therapeutic Christianity in the Ex-Gay Movement

Tanya Erzen

17 “Jesus Is My Doctor”: Healing and Religion in African American Women's Lives

Stephanie Y. Mitchem

18: Gender and Healing in Navajo Society

Thomas J. Csordas

Part IV Synergy, Syncretism, and Appropriation

19 Multiple Meanings of Chinese Healing in the United States

Linda L. Barnes

20 Rituals of Healing in African American Spiritual Churches

Claude F. Jacobs

21 Complementary and Alternative Medicine in America's “Two Buddhisms,”

David Numrich Paul

22 La Mesa del Santo Niño de Atocha and the Conchero Dance Tradition of Mexico-Tenochtilaάn: Religious Healing in Urban Mexico and the United States

Inés Hernández-avila

23 Subtle Energies and the American Metaphysical Tradition

Robert Fuller

24 Taking Seriously the Nature of Religious Healing in America

Edith Turner

Part V Intersections with Medical and Psychotherapeutic Discourses

25 Dimensions of Islamic Religious Healing in America

Marcia Hermansen

26 Health, Faith Traditions, and South Asian Indians in North America

Prakash N. Desai

27 Among Shamanism: Animist Spiritual Healing in America's Urban Heartland

Phua Xiong, Charles Numrich, Wu Chu Yongyuan, Deu Yang, and Gregory A. Plotnikoff

28 Spirituality and the Healing of Addictions: A Shamanic Drumming Approach

Michael Winkelman

29 The Healing Genes

Kaja Finkler

Part VI Conclusion

30 Religion and Healing: The Four Expectations

Martin E. Marty

31: Afterword: A Physician's Reflections

Harold G. Koenig

End Matter

Index