Healing to All Their Fleshasks us to step back and carefully rethink the relationship between religion and health. It does so by examining overlooked issues of theology and meaning that lie at the foundation of religion’s supposed beneficial function. Is a religion-health relationship consistent with understandings of faith within respective traditions? What does this actually imply? What does it not imply? How have these ideas been distorted? Why does this matter—for medicine and healthcare and also for the practice of faith? Is the ultimate relation between spirit and flesh, as mediated by the context of human belief and experience, a topic that can even be approached through empirical observation, scientific reasoning, and the logic of intellectual discourse?8 pag e photo insertThe editors of this collection, Drs. Jeff Levin and Keith G. Meador, have gathered together the writings of leading Jewish and Christian theological, pastoral, ethical, and religious scholars to answer these important questions. Contributors include Richard Address, William Cutter, Elliot N. Dorff, Dayle A. Friedman, Stanley Hauerwas, Warren Kinghorn, M. Therese Lysaught, Stephen G. Post, John Swinton, and Simkha Y. Weintraub, with a foreword by Samuel E. Karff.
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| Foreword | |
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| Acknowledgments | |
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| Prologue. The Intersection of Spirituality, Theology, and Health | |
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| Jewish Perspectives | |
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| Cure and Healing, Where God Met Science: Four Decades of Spiritual Progress | |
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| Contemplating a Theology of Healthy Aging | |
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| Dwindling or Grateful: Toward a Resilient Old Age | |
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| Using Jewish Law to Respond to Contemporary Issues in Bioethics | |
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| Give Me Your Hand: Exploring Judaism's Approach to the Relationship of Spirit and Health | |
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| Christian Perspectives | |
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| St. Thomas Aquinas and the End(s) of Religion, Spirituality, and Health | |
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| Beguiling Religion: The Bifurcations and Biopolitics of Spirituality and Medicine | |
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| The Ontological Generality in Spirituality and Health | |
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| From Health to Shalom: Why the Religion and Health Debate Needs Jesus | |
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| Suffering Presence: Twenty-Five Years Later | |
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| Epilogue. Theology and Health: Challenges and Possibilities | |
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| About the Contributors | |
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| Index | |
Jeff Levin, Ph.D., M.P.H., an epidemiologist and former medical school professor, is the pioneering scientist whose research beginning in the 1980s helped to create the field of religion and health. He left a successful academic career in 1997 to devote his full-time efforts to writing, research, and consulting. He was the first scientist to systematically review and critique the empirical literature on the health effects of religious involvement. His research has been funded by several NIH grants, and he also has received funding from private sources, including the American Medical Association and the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Dr. Levin has served as chairman of the NIH Working Group on Quantitative Methods in Alternative Medicine, as president of the International Society for the Study of Subtle Energies and Energy Medicine, and as an editorial board member of several peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, The Gerontologist, Journal of Religious Gerontology, and Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. He has authored over 130 scholarly publications, and over 120 conference presentations and invited lectures and addresses, mostly on the role of religion in physical and mental health and aging. He has published four other books: God, Faith, and Health: Exploring the Spirituality-Healing Connection, Religion in Aging and Health: Theoretical Foundations and Methodological Frontiers, Faith Matters: A Festschrift in Honor of Dr. David B. Larson, and Essentials of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. He is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and lives in rural Kansas.
