Description
Book SynopsisAmanda Porterfield offers a survey of ideas, rituals, and experiences of healing in Christian history. Jesus himself performed many miracles of healing, and Christians down the ages have seen this as a prominent feature of their faith. Indeed, healing is one of the most constant themes in the long and sprawling history of Christianity. Changes in healing beliefs and practices offer a window into changes in religious authority, church structure, and ideas about sanctity, history, resurrection, and the kingdom of God. Porterfield chronicles these changes, at the same time shedding important new light on the universality of religious healing. Finally, she looks at recent scientific findings about religion''s biological effects, and considers the relation of these findings to ages-old traditions about belief and healing.
Trade ReviewIn an era newly attentive to the relationship between religion and health, this striking analysis of Christianity as a religion of healing offers insights deeply informed by imaginative research, breadth of scope, and clarity of argument. Beginning with the texts of the New Testament and concluding with the healers and hospital builders of the late twentieth century, Amanda Porterfield provides a skillful description of the manifold ways that Christians have engaged in practices of healing for the past two thousand years. The book is an eye-opener. * E. Brooks Holifield, author of Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War *
Table of ContentsINTRODUCTION; NOTES; INDEX
