Bearing Prophetic Witness: A Strategy to Integrate Patients' Spirituality into Medical Care for Holistic Healing (original) (raw)
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Care for the Sick in Early Christianity: Lessons for the Current COVID-19 Stricken Church
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Debates on whether early Christians relied solely on exorcism and other miraculous healing under the assumption that all diseases are a result of demonic activity, continue. On the one end of this scholarly continuum are those who hold that early Christians only approached disease and healing as purely spiritual phenomena (hence, focusing on exorcism and other kinds of miraculous healing), while, on the other end, others have argued that early Christians accepted a naturalistic view of the causes for diseases and, consequently, sought naturalistic solutions to diseases. However, like in many other areas of life and thought in early Christianity, there is truth in both of these contentions. Rather than choose sides in this debate, this paper will argue that, just like in other areas, early Christians chose and modified existing approaches to sickness and death based on their understanding of the scriptural teachings on these subjects. As such, their approaches provide some key lesson...
Spirituality and Health in Pandemic Times: Lessons from the Ancient Wisdom
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The goal of this paper is to analyze how the historical episode of the so-called Plague of Athens between the years 430 and 426 BC seems to have been the first phenomenon classified as an epidemic by Hippocrates, and the historian Thucydides described its cultural, social, political and religious consequences. However, such a crisis generated the need for a new culture, and consequently a new theological mentality, as a cultural driver that made it possible to transform the Asclepiad Sanctuary of Kos into the first hospital in the West to integrate spirituality and science as ways to promote the healing of culture in order to achieve the ideal of health. The adopted method was a semantic analysis of the classic texts that help contextualize the Hippocratic view of the epidemic, spirituality, and health, and how these questions were received by Christianity at the time. The reception of this experience by Christianity, despite suffering some tension, also expands this Greek ideal and constitutes a true heritage of ancient wisdom that can be revisited in the time of the new pandemic, COVID-19. The perspective assumed here is interdisciplinary, putting in dialogue Theology and Health Sciences.
Churches against hospitals ? : Deliverance and healers in the field of public health
in Fancello S. & Gusman A. (eds.), Charismatic Healers in Contemporary Africa. Deliverance in Muslim and Christian Worlds, London, Bloomsbury, 2022
The global phenomenon of deliverance, linked to the explosion of African Pentecostalism since the early 1990s, placed the quest for healing at the centre of conversion and consultation itineraries, so much so that deliverance centres, unlike churches, have made healing their main activity. "is chapter analyses, on the one hand, the contribution of Pentecostal churches to beliefs in witchcra# through a process of demonization of pagan spirits and ancestors to which they attribute diseases, ailments and misfortunes. "is interpretation of disease invalidates the use of medicine, rendering it useless and ine$ective, and sometimes results in the abandonment of treatment. "rough its success, the religious healing o$er from evangelical churches gradually came to compete with the medical !eld and with traditional healers. "is plurality of non-medical and religious practices raises a serious public health issue.
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A chronicle recounting an epidemic outbreak in southwestern Anatolia that afflicted Edessa in the year 499 serves as a backdrop for explaining the evolution of a Christian approach to care and healing. Swollen by migrants escaping famine, this ancient population center was quite vulnerable to the spread of infectious diseases. The narrative explains the process of creating a Christian mission of mercy through adoptions of ancient Egyptian and Jewish models of social welfare, making the care of sick people a key component of the Church’s sponsored good works. A section is devoted to the rise of hostels-- xenodocheia or xenones—established to shelter and feed the poor, wanderers or guests, sick and disabled seeking assistance. Prominent bishop- sponsored institutions in Cappadocia and Caesarea, staffed by clergy and secular physicians practicing classical Greco Roman medicine, represent the forerunners of the Western hospital.
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