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Religious healing is a hot topic in contemporary public and academic discourse. Over the past several decades, medical researchers, religious believers, and scholars from a variety of disciplines have been exploring and debating the relationship between faith and health. Studies aiming to assess the value of contemplative practices for coping with physical pain and the efficacy of petitionary prayer for curing bodily illness have stimulated controversy among scientists and seized the attention of popular news media. Publications such as Newsweek and Time have frequently reported on growing grass-roots interest in intersections among religious belief, spiritual practice, and physical well-being. At the same time, medical anthropologists, sociologists and scholars of religion have documented the myriad ways in which a wide variety of faith communities seek to integrate the insights of biomedicine with the resources of their religious traditions.
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Amanda Porterfield's sweeping study, Healing in the History of Christianity, reminds us that interest in religious healing is nothing new. In fact, Porterfield asserts, the practice of healing has been a part of "many, if not all" faith traditions around the world and throughout history. Christians, she contends, have made healing a "defining element" of their religious experience from the time of Jesus through the present and have proved themselves especially adept at promoting their faith as a means of attaining personal, social, and eternal health. The "distinctive" emphasis Christians have placed upon healing, Porterfield argues, helps to explain Christianity's "endurance, expansion, and success" as a world religion. Since its inception, Christianity has appealed to people in a variety of different cultural and historical contexts because of its ability to serve as an "antidote" for suffering of all kinds; a means of coping with the diseases, stresses, fears, and alienations caused by social dislocation, political oppression, economic upheavals, and cataclysmic cultural change.
Porterfield supports her thesis with a remarkable range of data. Spanning the first to the 21st centuries, Porterfield's story encompasses the entire sweep of Christian history. The book's geographical scope is equally vast. Not only does Porterfield attend to the place of healing in both Eastern and Western European forms of Christianity, she also examines how healing figured in Christianity's global expansion throughout Africa, India, Asia, and the Americas. Focusing on healing as a central feature of Christian faith and practice also enables Porterfield to incorporate an extraordinarily diverse cast of characters, many of whom have been overlooked in standard historical treatments. Alongside the usual suspects—the apostle Paul, the Virgin Mary, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, to name a few of the most prominent—less familiar personages appear as key participants in the chronicle of Christian history. Women such as the medieval abbess and herbalist Hildegaard of Bingen; the health reformer and Seventh-day Adventist leader Ellen G. White; Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science; and Bernadette Soubrious, the visionary of Lourdes, come into view, as do Native American leaders and prophets such Kateri Tekawitha, Handsome Lake, Wovoka, and Black Elk. Revolutionaries who have conceived of Christian healing in social and political terms also emerge as important characters in the story. Participants in China's Taiping Rebellion, Latin American liberation movements, and anti-apartheid efforts in South Africa play important roles in the ongoing drama of Christianity's development.
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