Abstract
In a world where human bodies are wounded due to health crises, natural disasters, political conflicts, and social divisions, there is a resounding call for the need to “heal.” This edited collection approaches healing from a Christian spiritual perspective but presumes no fundamental agreement as to what spiritual healing entails. In the Introduction, Sarah Coakley emphasizes the polysemous nature of the terms “spiritual” and “healing.” This theme of definitional ambiguity weaves throughout the collection of ten essays, as scholars across the humanities, mind sciences, and anthropology seek to delimit the ways in which spiritual healing is contextualized, interpreted, and understood. Each essay brings a different lens to the topic, providing the reader with a broadly interdisciplinary introduction to the subject of spiritual healing.
This book is the third in an interdisciplinary trilogy dedicated to a hermeneutics of the body. At the heart of this work is the ongoing inquiry into the relationship between science and the spiritual. In this collection, Anne Harrington, Philip Clayton, and John Swinton, among others, insightfully engage with questions of disciplinary presuppositions that bear upon interpretation and meaning in spiritual healing experiences. Overall, the essays are well-suited for an advanced undergraduate course, and also could be of interest to spiritual ministers. Coakley reminds those who are practitioners of spiritual healing that “well-informed teaching in these areas is thus an invaluable background accompaniment to the healing practices themselves” (25). Unlike the first two volumes in the trilogy, which take an explicitly interreligious approach to the topics of body and pain, this volume limits its voices to those speaking from or about ecumenical Christian or unaffiliated spiritualities. Neither ethnic nor religious diversity is a strength of this collection, although Thomas J. Csordas’s anthropological essay is a notable exception insofar as it brings a Navajo perspective into the conversation. As an edited collection, this book’s interdisciplinary breadth bespeaks its relevance to the contemporary world and invites additional voices to continue the discussion.