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How does religious healing work, if indeed it does? In this study of the contemporary North American movement known as the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, Thomas Csordas investigates the healing practices of a modern religious movement to provide a rich cultural analysis of the healing experience. This is not only a book about healing, however, but also one about the nature of self and self- transformation. Blending ethnographic data and detailed case studies, Csordas examines processes of sensory imagery, performative utterance, orientation, and embodiment. His book forms the basis for a rapprochement between phenomenology and semiotics in culture theory that will interest anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, physicians, and students of comparative religion and healing.

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About the Author
Thomas J. Csordas is Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University.

Customer Reviews

An excellent book on many religious & philosophical themes
Csordas (pronounced CHOR-das) is an anthropologist who has followed the development of the Christian 'Charismatic Renewal' for 20 years, and draws on his study of this movement and its notions of healing for this book. He seeks to understand how religious healing might work, and to this end he presents a philosophical investigation of the self, how it is perceived, constituted, reshaped. Along with the central issue of religious healing, he deals with a host of fascinating topics such as the mind-body relationship, ritual, demonic possession, religious experience, the rhetoric and semiotics of religious language, psychiatry, and mental and physical illness.

Csordas's method, which he calls 'cross-cultural phenomenology' is both philosophical and anthropological. He includes theoretical discussions as well as ethnography and evidence. Moreover, he is intelligent, broad-minded, and strives to be fair in his analyses. For this reason, readers with diverse interests are bound to find this an intriguing and useful read. This is an important book for several fields and deserves to be read widely. At the same time, it is a well-written and enjoyably readable book. The chapters are titled as follows: 1: Introduction, 2: Ritual Healing, 3: Therapeutic Process and Experience, 4: Emboied Imagery and Divine Revelation, 5: Imaginal Performance and Healing of Memories, 6: Image, Memory and Efficacy, 7: Demons and Deliverance, 8: Encounters with Evil, 9: The Raging and the Healing, 10: Envoi: The Sacred Self.