Reimagining the Healing Service

2020 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-178
Author(s):  
Devan Stahl
Keyword(s):  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Healing Services

Services of healing and wholeness need to be reimagined so that they better represent various experiences of disability. This article begins with a brief historical survey of the ways in which healing services and anointings have been understood in the Christian tradition. While far from exhaustive, this history reveals the Christian notion of healing to be contentious and evolving. Next, I analyze how these historical understandings have come to shape the ways Christians understand disabilities in our modern culture as well as the mechanism by which healing is carried out. Finally, I provide tips for constructing non-ableist services of healing and wholeness.

scholarly journals The Preference of Models over Laws of Nature in Chemistry

2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (S1) ◽  
pp. S87-S101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Schummer
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Mathematical Physics ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
Methodological Pluralism ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Natural Laws ◽  
Mechanical Philosophy ◽  
Original Concept

Although the notion of God as the legislator of nature was already known in the Jewish-Christian tradition, the modern concept of laws of nature was established only in the seventeenth-century mechanical philosophy of nature, particularly by Descartes and Newton, and remained largely confined to that tradition before it became seriously questioned in quantum mechanics. After a brief historical survey, I first discuss various examples of so-called laws of nature in chemistry and physical chemistry proposed in the nineteenth century to conclude that none of them really correspond to the original concept, but that they rather comprise a variety of epistemologically different statements. More recent philosophical approaches to extend the concept of laws, so as to cover chemical cases, all result in inacceptable consequences. The deeper reason of the comparatively little importance of natural laws, I finally argue, is that chemistry as the original epitome of the experimental or Baconian science has largely followed methodological pluralism in which a variety of models to be chosen from for pragmatic reasons are preferred over universal laws of nature as in mathematical physics.

Opera and Modern Culture

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence Kramer
Keyword(s):  
Modern Culture

All is of God

10.1558/32682 ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-104
Author(s):  
Jon Paul Sydnor
Keyword(s):  
Christian Tradition

This essay elaborates a constructive, comparative, nondual theodicy for the Christian tradition based on the Hindu Vai??ava tradition. According to the Indologist Henrich Zimmer, in Vai??avism everything is an emanation of Vi??u, therefore everything is of Vi??u. All apparent opposites are inherently divine and implicitly complementary. Good and bad, joy and suffering, pain and pleasure are not conflicting dualities; they are interdependent qualities that increase one another’s being. The Hindu myth of Samudra Manthan, or the Churning of the Ocean, exemplifies Vai??ava nondualism. In that story, gods and demons—seeming opposites—cooperate in order to extract the nectar of immortality from an ocean of milk. If “opposites” are interdependent, hence complementary, then they are not “opposites” but mutually amplifying contrasts. Given this phenomenology, and applying it to the Christian tradition, a benevolent God who desires full vitality for her creatures would have to create pain, suffering, darkness, and death in order to intensify their correlates. Love would demand their creation, because love would want abundant life for all. In this aesthetic theodicy, the interplay of all contrasts results from the love of a life-giving God.

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