Faith Healing

Pullum accounts for the persuasive appeals of some of the most popular American healing evangelists of this century and establishes a rhetorical genre of faith healing discourse. For each, he discusses their background, the nature of the audiences to whom they preached, and why they were so successful. Pullum concludes by drawing together the major rhetorical features of faith-healing discourse.

Do miracles really happen? What is the evidence for paranormal phenomena that demonstrate divine power, and what alternative explanations can be offered for such apparently miraculous occurrences? How does the earnest inquirer assess the conflicting evidence and reach a conclusion? These and related questions are answered in this illuminating examination of miracle claims by respected historical, paranormal, and forensic investigator Joe Nickell. Not a critique of religion but rather a careful examination of the evidence relating to specific claims of the miraculous, Looking for a Miracle investigates a panoply of strange events, powers, and objects that are at the center of the controversy between so-called miraculists and confirmed skeptics. Among the phenomena studied are "Miraculous Pictures", like the Shroud of Turin, the Edessan Image, and the Image of Guadalupe; seemingly "Magical Icons", such as weeping, bleeding, and otherwise animated paintings and statues; "Mystical Relics", including "burning handprints", the liquefying blood of St. Januarius, and ostensibly "incorruptible" corpses of saints; "Pentecostal Powers", such as speaking in tongues, the gift of prophecy, taking up serpents, and other powers and immunities; "Faith Healing", including the reported miracle cures at Lourdes and the practices of evangelists, Christian Scientists, and "psychic surgeons"; "Ecstatic Visions", like the apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Fatima and Medjugorje; and such "Sanctified Powers" as luminosity, levitation, bilocation, stigmata, inedia (the going without food); and the ability to produce objects out of thin air. Looking for a Miracle is a wide-ranging investigative study of acontroversial topic that has all too often been approached either with excessive credulity or a dismissive attitude. Religious believers and rationalist thinkers alike have much to learn from this revealing examination of the eviden

Pristine shamanism in Greenland is examined and the ambivalent nature of the shaman and the spirit world in the tough Arctic environment is then contrasted with the more benign attitude to shamanism in the New Age.

Shamanism, humanity's most ancient spiritual practice, has achieved a dramatic modern resurgence. The foundations and appeal of shamanism are rooted in human nature, the psychobiology of consciousness, and archetypal structures of the brain and mind. The classic shamanic motif of death and rebirth represents the development of self through the symbolic death of the old self to permit the emergence and integration of a higher order self.

Lewis analyses the characteristics of truly dangerous groups compared to those of the merely unusual but innocuous, and he discusses what people find attractive about membership in minority religions, as well as community suspicions and media hype that lead to misunderstandings. The bulk of the book is devoted to a broad-based survey of unusual religious groups. Included are minority religious sects stemming from Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, and Sikh tradition, as well as unrelated groups such as the Moonies, Wiccans, Satanists, Spiritualists, Channellers, Scientologists, the Heaven's Gate cult, a host of New Age and UFO groups, and many others. This is the definitive sourcebook for understanding and researching the crazy-quilt landscape of free religious expression in America.

For the residents of the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, mainstream medical care is often supplemented or replaced by a host of traditional practices: the Sun Dance, the yuwipi sing, the heyok'a ceremony, herbalism, the Sioux Religion, the peyotism of the Native American Church, and other medicines, or sources of healing. Thomas H. Lewis, a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist, describes those practices as he encountered them in the late 1960s and early 1970s.During many months he studied with leading practitioners. He describes the healers-their techniques, personal histories and qualities, the problems addressed and results obtained-and examines past as well as present practices. The result is an engrossing account that may profoundly affect the way readers view the dynamics of therapy for mind and body.Retired from the National Naval Medical Center, where he served as chief of psychiatry, and from Georgetown University School of Medicine, Thomas H. Lewis now lives in Montana.

From the mass weddings of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church to the mass suicides at Jonestown, charismatic cults and their devotees have become facts of American life. Once exotic offshoots of the Sixties counterculture exciting suspicion, scorn, terror, and counter-terror (as in the brief vogue of "deprogrammers"), cults have grown so common and entered so many areas of public life--managing everything from roadside flower-sellers to major metropolitan newspapers and nation-wide political campaigns--that only spectacular disasters like the immolation of the Philadelphia cult MOVE seem to remind us how extraordinary their burgeoning really is. Using material gleaned from fifteen years of direct encounters with cults and their detractors, as well as a wide range of his quantitative research, Marc Galanter shows not only how cult members feel and think at all stages of their involvement but also how larger social and psychological forces interact within the cults to command and reinforce individual commitment. After examining the powerful combination of social cohesiveness, shared beliefs, and altered consciousness that cults offer potential recruits, Galanter shows how these forces are orchestrated into self-contained social systems that relieve anxiety within while warding off threats--real or imagined--from without. Finally, he demonstrates this basic system in action, both in apparently successful movements like the Unification Church and in catastrophic failures such as MOVE and Jim Jones's People's Temple, and reflects on how and why some groups turn to violence. The book is full of compelling stories--first-person accounts of conversions, daily life under the rule of charismatic leaders, disillusionments, and departures both voluntary and forced--and fascinating overviews of many of the most influential cults, including the most comprehensive psychological analysis ever published of the evolution of the "Moonies." Many of Galanter's findings, especially his account of the similarities between cults and "zealous" self-help movements, are highly controversial, and his discussion of the powerful influence that Alcoholics Anonymous exerts over its members will spark much debate. Moving beyond the exposes and confessions that have characterized so much of the literature on this subject, Galanter offers the most extensive psychological analysis of cults available. Although based on extensive on-site research, it is immediately accessible to both the general reader and to anyone personally or professionally concerned with cults.

In this uniquely personal account of the lives and healing arts of female shamans in northern Peru, the author alternates diaristic writings about her own experiences with ethnographic description. Her analytical essays explore the concepts of sorcery, shamanism, and witchcraft, case studies of Peruvian women and their ritual healing techniques, the healers' religious and symbolic space, and the healing attributes unique to women. They alternate with chapters in which Glass-Coffin describes her introduction to Peru as a high school student, the traditional roles she adopted in her host family, the crisis that rocked her identity, her first ritual contact with a female healer, and her own tumultuous but ultimately rewarding healing journey under two female shamans. Male shamans, she concludes, sally forth into the spirit world to do individual combat with the sources of spiritual illness, whereas female shamans try to involve their patients more directly in their own healing.

Young-Eisendrath teaches readers how to learn from their hardships by drawing on the traditions that have enriched her life experience--the theories of Jung, the practice of psychoanalysis, and the teachings of Buddhism--as well as the stories of people who have faced tremendous downfall and come through it. "An edifying work on the stewardship of pain".--"Body Mind Spirit".