Description
What does healing mean for Christians and others in an age of science? How can we combine scientific findings about our bodies, philosophical understanding of our minds and theological investigations about our spirits with a coherent and unified model of the person? How does God continue to create through nature and direct our wandering towards becoming created co-creators capable of ministering to others?
The reality of human suffering demands that theology and science mutually inform each other in a shared understanding of nature, humanity, and paths to healing. In Insight to Heal, Mark Graves draws upon systems theory, pragmatic philosophy, and biological and cognitive sciences to deal with wounds that could limit personal growth, and uses information theory, emergence, and Christian theology to define healing as distinct from a return to a prior state of being, but rather to create real possibility in who the person may become.
About the Author
Mark Graves has twenty-five years of experience in researching and modelling cognitive, biological, and religious dimensions of the person, and has published forty technical and scholarly works in those areas, including Mind, Brain, and the Elusive Soul (2008). He has taught at Baylor College of Medicine; the University of California, Berkeley; Santa Clara University; and the Graduate Theological Union, including on healing and science at the Pacific School of Religion. He is currently Research Fellow at Fuller Theological Seminary.
Contents
List of Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I: Religious Experience of Nature
Introduction to Part I
1. Awakening Experience
2. Theological Reflection
3. Experience and Nature
4. Nature’s Mind
Part II: Human Systems of Spirituality
Introduction to Part II
5. Discerning Experience
6. Spiritual Communities
7. Human Systems
8. Nature’s Emergence
Part III: Real Possibility of Beautiful Healing
Introduction to Part III
9. Experience of Beauty
10. Theology of Beauty
11. Forms of Nature
12. Nature’s Healing
Bibliography
Glossary
Subject Index
Scripture Index
Endorsements and Reviews
Mark Graves’ new book is a marvel of creative synthesis. He brings together the latest scientific research on suffering and combines it with a deeply sensitive understanding of Christian theology to produce a powerful guide to healing at all levels – physical, mental, spiritual, and cultural. The emphasis on beauty is especially valuable as a reminder that true healing involves a transformative reorientation of the person. This book offers wonderful resources for therapists, ministers, chaplains, doctors, nurses, and anyone involved in health care. Beyond those practical benefits, Graves has given us a thought-provoking meditation on the twenty-first century relationship between science and theology.
Kelly Bulkeley, Visiting Scholar, Graduate Theological Union
