Spirituality, Religiousness and Health by Giancarlo Lucchetti & Mario Fernando Prieto Peres & Rodolfo Furlan Damiano

Author:Giancarlo Lucchetti & Mario Fernando Prieto Peres & Rodolfo Furlan Damiano
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030212216
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

2 Religious Transformation, Spirituality and Health

The search for meaning seems to be a significant component in the discussion of religious transformation in contemporary European culture. Religious meaning systems have had and continue to have tremendous impact on the way sufferers seek to make sense of often senseless suffering, of making sense when all other narratives of meaning and comfort seem to silence. This may well be one of the reasons why the great secularization theories have failed: No other meaning system seem as powerful as religious ones do, especially in the face of death, and as we are often reminded, science as the trump of secularization has not just yet been able to annihilate death, which in many ways is what religion proposes to do.

Historically there has been a tremendous confluence of religion, health and healing. This holds for Christianity as for most other world religions (Woodward 2000), although religious leaders believe the attention to this interplay have been hampered by secularization. In a very influential article, Aram I. Keshishian, Catholicos of the Armenian Orthodox Church in Lebanon and for decades the moderator of the World Council of Churches, made a statement in which he lamented the extent to which the church had lost the healing dimension of the church:

Healing belongs to the very esse (being) of the church. The church is endowed by God’s grace and power of healing. Hence, the prevailing missiological misconception that considers healing a “specialized ministry” of the church and neglects it as a core element needs to be corrected by an ecclesiological understanding that perceives healing to be integral to the church’s being, manifested through its sacramental life, diaconal action and evangelistic outreach (Aram I Kishishian 2005).

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