Faith in the Great Physician
Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900
Faith in the Great Physician
Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900
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Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 9780801886867
Number of Pages: 288
Published: 25/01/2008
Width: 15.2 cm
Height: 22.9 cm
Faith in the Great Physician tells the story of how participants in the evangelical divine healing movement of the late nineteenth century transformed the ways Americans coped with physical affliction and pursued bodily health. Examining the politics of sickness, health, and healing during this period, Heather D. Curtis encourages critical reflection on the theological, cultural, and social forces that come into play when one questions the purpose of suffering and the possibility of healing. Curtis finds that advocates of divine healing worked to revise a deep-seated Christian ethic that linked physical suffering with spiritual holiness. By engaging in devotional disciplines and participating in social reform efforts, proponents of faith cure embraced a model of spiritual experience that endorsed active service, rather than passive endurance, as the proper Christian response to illness and pain. Emphasizing the centrality of religious practices to the enterprise of divine healing, Curtis sheds light on the relationship among Christian faith, medical science, and the changing meanings of suffering and healing in American culture.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. A Thorn in the Flesh: Pain, Illness, and Religion in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America
2. Resisting Resignation: The Rise of Religious Healing in the Late Nineteenth Century
3. Acting Faith: The Devotional Ethics and Gendered Dynamics of Divine Healing
4. The Use of Means: Divine Healing as Devotional Practice
5. Houses of Healing: Sacred Space, Social Geography, and Gender in Divine Healing
6. The Lord for the Body, the Gospel for the Nations: Divine Healing and Social Reform
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Heather Curtis has done both the historical guild and the church a great favor in so elegantly narrating the history of a movement that challenged long-standing assumptions about the spiritual utility of corporal pain-and, in so doing, remapped our imaginations and transformed our understanding of suffering. -- Lauren F. Winner Books and Culture: A Christian Review 2008 Students of American religious history and American culture will find this work worthy of attention. Recommended. Choice An illuminating and exceedingly careful examination of a historical terrain chock-full of landmines... Its careful attention to the experiences of both laity and elites is as strong as its evenhanded interpretation. -- Mark A. Noll Christian Century 2008 Fascinating story told by Heather D. Curtis. -- Rennie B. Schoepflin Journal of American History 2009 Thoughtfully rendered study. -- Paul Harvey American Studies 2007 Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860-1900 is an engaging and informative analysis of the divine healing movement, grounded in a wide-ranging view of its social and cultural, medical and religious milieu... Heather Curtis is to be commended for this splendid contribution to the scholarship of the era. -- Nancy A. Hardesty Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Lyrical and convincing. -- Pamela E. Klassen Church History 2010 Careful historical research that scholars of American religion and American history will find indispensable. -- Lynn S. Neal Journal of Religion 2010
