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Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity

Online ISBN:
9780520950443
Print ISBN:
9780520244283
Publisher:
University of California Press
Book

Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity

Published online:
24 May 2012
Published in print:
14 July 2011
Online ISBN:
9780520950443
Print ISBN:
9780520244283
Publisher:
University of California Press

Abstract

This book reveals how liberal Protestants went from being early-twentieth-century medical missionaries seeking to convert others through science and scripture, to becoming vocal critics of missionary arrogance who experimented with non-western healing modes such as Yoga and Reiki. Drawing on archival and ethnographic sources, the book shows how and why the very notion of healing within North America has been infused with a Protestant “supernatural liberalism”. In the course of coming to their changing vision of healing, liberal Protestants became pioneers three times over: in the struggle against the cultural and medical pathologizing of homosexuality; in the critique of Christian missionary triumphalism; and in the diffusion of an ever-more ubiquitous anthropology of “body, mind, and spirit”. At a time when the political and anthropological significance of Christianity is being hotly debated, the book forcefully argues for a reconsideration of the historical legacies and cultural effects of liberal Protestantism, even for the anthropology of religion itself.

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