A Tender View of Conservative Evangelicalism in Higher Ground

To understand the use of medicinal plants and the role of faith in the family care system. The adopted methodology is qualitative research, conducted in April and July 2015, in a municipality of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, Brazil, with three informants who have knowledge of the healthcare practices. The data were interpreted using interpretive anthropology. Data interpretation led to two categories: Medicinal plants in health care and Care with the use of plants in the blessing ritual. It was identified that the use of plants and faith healing is a particular form of self-care in that given community. The purpose of this practice is to cure people from a biological and comprehensive perspective, involving the body, soul, spirit, and environment. The research revealed that medicinal plants go beyond the merely biological relationship in the family care system. Use of these plants is not based on the principle of buying and selling, but rather on the act of exchanging, giving, receiving, and reciprocating.

ABSTRACT: Being aware of biblical perspectives on health and healing is important for nurses as they care for patients and families who may ask about supernatural healing and/or Christian healing prayer. This article explores health and healing as found in the Bible and asks six important questions: Does God still heal today? Should we pray for healing? Do our prayers make a difference? Do we always get what we request? Does faith have anything to do with healing? If a person does not experience healing, does that indicate lack of faith? A chart of healing encounters in the Gospels and Acts relays 33 supernatural healing events and the role of faith in each.

The Role of Faith in Wellness (for Otolaryngologists).

Book Reviews

Significant controversy surrounds individuals' reliance on religious healing approaches to the treatment of illness, particularly when such efforts focus on the provision of care for children. These approaches, rooted in organized religions and their theologies, encompass a wide range of practices, ranging from prayer, meditation, and the laying on of hands, to exorcism, speaking in tongues, Spiritism, shamanic intervention, and various rituals of Santería. Numerous faith communities espouse one or more forms of religious healing while discouraging reliance on conventional medical treatments: These communities include the Christian Science Church, the Church of the First Born, End Time Ministries, Faith Tabernacle, Followers of Christ Church, Bible Believers' Fellowship, Christ Assembly, Christ Miracle Healing Center, Church of God Chapel, Church of God of the Union Assembly, Holiness Church, Jesus Through Jon and Judy, “No Name” Fellowship, Northeast Kingdom Community Church, and The Source.Others, such as the Assemblies of God, have moved away from an exclusive reliance on religious healing practices to a more holistic approach that combines religious-healing with at least some aspects of biomedicine. For many of these listed groups, health and illness represent the physical manifestation of moral concerns relating to salvation, which can only be addressed through religious healing.

<i>The Green Depression: American Ecoliterature in the 1930s and 1940s</i> by Matthew M. Lambert

Guaranteed Pure: Moody Bible Institute, Business, and Making of Modern Evangelism Timothy E. W. Gloege. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.Guaranteed Pure: Moody Bible Institute, Business, and Making of Modern Evangelicalism tells story of founding and evolution of Moody Bible Institute through its history of practical management. front cover hosts a photograph of A. F. Gaylord, manager of Moody Bible Institute (MBI, named after Moody's death in 1900). inside cover describes emergence of a consumer-oriented ?orthodoxy'... [guaranteed of both liberal theology and Populist excesses, calling it old-time religion dependent on consumer capitalism. Reviewers praise book for advancing readers' knowledge of Protestant fundamentalism. author Timothy E. W. Gloege writes, This book attempts to explain continuing vibrancy of conservative and its ideological and political allegiances to consumer capitalism (13). Noting fundamentalism embraces an impossibly diverse coalition of people, Gloege limits his inclusion to those claiming label in 1910s and 1920s; he also bounds modern consumer capitalism, warning it cannot explain all aspects of conservative evangelicalism (14). book does, however, claim that core leadership of early fundamentalist movement-those who controlled key institutions, funded its endeavors, and helped define what ?fundamentals' were-was profoundly influenced by business (14).Gloege organizes the story of corporate in two parts: rise of post-Civil war and ensuing crisis; and, after 1900, its evolution into conservative evangelicalism. first chapter traces Dwight L. Moody's early life, rise of evangelical realism, and Moody's ideas of Christian work; Chapter 2 treats rising labor unrest and development of Moody Bible Institute (MBI); and Chapter 3 introduces early life of American evangelist Rueben A. Torrey (1889-1908), head of Bible Institute of Chicago Evangelization Society, later to become Moody Bible Institute, and his ideas about power for service. Chapter 4 examines 1890's crisis at Moody, involving radical evangelicals and faith healer John Alexander Dowie. Belonging to Part Two, Chapter 5 devotes itself to a Business Basis spearheaded by Henry Parsons Crowell, a leader in oatmeal in 1882 and Quaker Oats in 1891. Following a leave of absence by Reuben A. Torrey, Crowell reorganized MBI, giving it a sound plan and a vision for future. Gloege describes Crowell as early pioneer in the trifecta of trademark, package, and promotion proved to be applicable to any consumer good, including story of MBI (117). Chapter 6 charts pivot at MBI from identity rooted in Christian work to one of pure religion rooted in consumer identity, and Chapter 7 focuses on The Fundamentals, a project resulting in creation of an ad hoc ?orthodoxy' (11). Finally, Chapter 8 describes a conflict between fundamentalists and modernists arising in 1910s and rise in 1920s of a fundamentalist coalition. Epilogue returns to role of MBI in development of conservative evangelicalism.Succinctly, Gloege lays out a framework for understanding American Protestantism. He first describes a ?churchly' orientation influenced North American settlement and emphasized authentic faith as requiring church membership in a particular church, religious authority rooted in Bible but exercised by church, and a biblical interpretation guided by theological tradition and ordained clergy (5). After rise of intellectual Enlightenment, responsibility for thinking became privilege of individual, who used reason and empirical observation to question long-standing assumptions (6). …

In 2018, The Chicago Tribune reported one of the most significant abuse scandals in evangelical megachurch history: Bill Hybels, Willow Creek Community Church’s founder, was accused of sexual assault and misconduct. Willow Creek staff and elders denied the allegations, refused to take action against Hybels, and accused the women of collusion. In response, survivors and sympathizers formed online networks of support through social media and blogposts, adding their voices to the #MeToo and #ChurchToo movements. While Willow Creek professed gender egalitarian theology, it failed to curb the power of its charismatic male leader. This paper argues that Willow Creek, which grew in the context of twentieth century American culture and conservative evangelicalism, harbored naturalized patriarchy, complementarian ideology, and gender individualism that resisted the examination of gender inequality. This demonstrates the limitations of egalitarian theology and the necessity of broader social movements and networks to unravel patriarchal religious systems.

Reviewed by: Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel’s Drama by Richard Rankin Russell Amy Nejezchleb Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel’s Drama by Richard Rankin Russell, pp. 317. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. $39.95. Home is a quietly contested place, full of liminal spaces and Richard Rankin Russell has given us a monograph on how the matter of home is handled in Friel’s major plays. Russell offers thorough analyses of the Donegal playwright’s most-loved, well-known, and most-often produced plays: Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), The Freedom of the City (1973), Faith Healer (1979), Translations (1980), and Dancing at Lughnasa (1999). Friel was to begin his career as a short story writer, but soon found his métier in the theater. He moved from short fiction to experiments in radio drama. It was the success of Philadelphia, Here I Come! that truly set him on his path, and sixteen years later, Translations propelled him to international acclaim. Not all of his creative endeavors gathered laurels; his fame often fluctuated due to the unevenness of his work. Russell traces the extraordinary impact of place on Friel’s protagonists. His characters seem perpetually to be looking for ways to temper, tolerate, or escape Irish culture; whether their reponses are against the fixed ideologies of nationalism and British imperialism, American modernization and reductivism, or the forced politicization of communities, Friel’s major plays all question the very nature of home. Russell is especially interested in how communities are impacted by modernity in the plays. His contribution adds to recent studies that investigate place and space in Irish theater, such as Helen Hausner Lojek’s The Spaces of Irish Drama (2011) and Chris Morash and Shaun Richards’s Mapping Irish Theatre: Theories of Space and Place (2013). Moreover, as Russell points out, Friel engages with more than local culture and community. He sets his plays in urban, public, and personal spaces, including the spaces of mind and body. The idea of place is fluid in Friel’s most poignant characters, including Frank Hardy, Maire and Yolland, and the Mundy sisters; indeed, Russell shows how characters create “place through their invention of community.” The first chapter focuses on the character of Gar in Philadelphia, the story of a young man intrigued by the promises of America, especially as he has seen it in film, which present a world seemingly wholly unlike his home. Hoping to escape a motionless Irish culture, Gar emigrates to follow the seductive promises of modernity. Yet the result is ironic: the Ireland of the 1960s that Gar leaves behind will transition to a newly dynamic and modernizing state, while Gar’s decision leads him to remain in his aunt and uncle’s apartment in Philadelphia, rehearsing the same stereotypical memories of the small island. The chimera of glamor that came to him by way of American films actually serves to divorce Gar from what truly makes him free, the sense of place he knows in his rural Irish community. In Chapter two, Russell uses Derrida’s theory of “hauntology” to illuminate [End Page 155] the stories of three very different protestors caught in Derry’s Guildhall in The Freedom of the City. These dispossessed tenants have been sacrificed—seized by the events of myth—while their ghosts form a community based on shared space. Like intersecting planes, the bodiless tenants interrogate past events and reveal their stories. The modern bullet of the brigadier comes to symbolize the conflict between the erosive idiolocalities of Irish nationalism, British imperialism, and western modernity. Chapter three explores Friel’s preoccupation with ideas of exile and homecoming. A secondary focus is the theater’s ability to create community, which Russell finds on full display in Faith Healer. Most critics read the central character of Frank Hardy as the artist or sage. In a daring twist on this, Russell interprets Frank’s death as a ritualized sacred communion—though some readers may have a hard time accepting his reading of the violent dismemberment of Frank’s body as positive. Modernity’s extreme opponents, personified by the Irish farmers who literally dismember Hardy with modern implements, enable Hardy to...

much as the diarist Anne Lister’s carefully recorded pleasure in looking at the female objects of her gaze. Might Eliot have been enjoying just such per­ formative voyeuristic gratifications in her novel-writing as Lister was when she recreated in her diary her observations (not to mention her pursuits) of other women? Mitchell engages energetically with Thomas Hardy’s gender ideology as constructed in four of his novels, concluding that Hardy is not only “the most modern and least Victorian of the authors” in her study (161) but by far the most scopophilic (157), yet she makes no attempt to relate this to the increasing prominence of visual media during his life-time (161). Her theoretical apparatus is at once most appropriate and most uninterrogated here. The camera’s eye/I was already transforming the image of woman as Hardy and his contemporaries wrote — Hollywood cinema, on which Mulvey and ultimately Mitchell would ground their work, only continued the pro­ cess. The Stone and the Scorpion, though it takes its title from Charlotte Bronte’s words, conducts its highly interesting analyses of erotic relations in Victorian novels from a second-wave feminist theoretical perspective. That that perspective has not been subjected to its own critique is its only sub­ stantive deficiency. WORKS CITED McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Con­ quest. New York: Routledge, 1995. Whitbread, Helena, ed. I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister (1791-1840). London: Virago P, 1988. m a r y w ilso n c a r p e n t e r / Queen’s University Denis Sampson, Outstaring Nature’s Eye: The Fiction of John McGahem (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993). xvii, 267. $34.95 US. Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone. John McGahem attended the funeral — as gravedigger, not as mourner — and he is still on the cemetery maintenance staff. In the three decades between the publication of his first novel and the recent appearance of his Collected Stories (1992), he has been a realist of the starkest vision and the sparest style. Delineating with uncompromising honesty the darker features of Irish life, urban as well as rural, particularly in the third quarter of the twentieth century, his work has that combination of the illuminating and the affective that discovers in the local and occasional the universal and timeless. Historians of the future will almost certainly 233 regard his narratives as sites providing a rich archaeological record of the peculiar manners and morals, the social forms and rituals, of the people and the class that produced him and that he reproduces. Readers of the present, whatever their background, cannot but find in his work the most detailed map of Lear’s discomfortable heath. As he turns sixty, McGahern is impressive less for the extent of his work than for its quality. His novels number a mere five: The Barracks {1963), The Dark (1965) — the last great book to be banned in the Ireland of prudent Jansenism — , The Leavetaking (1974), a tale extensively revised for a new edition a decade later, The Pomographer (1979), a post-censorship moral fa­ ble, and Amongst Women, the popular, critically celebrated award-winner of 1990. His shorter pieces numbered thirty-four by 1992, The Collected Stories adding two to those that had been gathered in Nightlines (1970), Getting Through (1978), and High Ground (1985). His is a meticulous craft, and it might be said of him, as it was of Goldsmith, that he adorned whatever he touched — were it not that adornment has precisely the wrong connota­ tions. McGahern is, above all, the craftsman of le mot juste, so it is hardly surprising that the French have translated all his works and that he is more widely read by them than by North Americans. Denis Sampson, who teaches at Vanier College in Ville St. Laurent, gives us in Outstaring Nature’s Eye the first comprehensive study of the fiction of McGahern. This is his second major contribution to McGahern criticism: in 1991 he edited a special issue of The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (17.1), an issue that includes interesting aesthetic-critical pronouncements by McGahern himself...

Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity

A study of a single congregation of a Holiness sect revealed that potential internal conflicts were buffered by a practice of selectively presenting ideological issues in a way which slighted more controversial questions. The organization gave prime time and staging to those issues on which there was already the most agreement, such as use of akohol and tobacco. On a questionnaire, adult members (high school age and older) expressed attitudes on fifteen ideological issues. (N= 105, 83% of the target population.) By degree of consensus, the issues ranked as follows: smoking, drinking of alcoholic beverage, reality of the Devil, Genesis account of creation, story of Jonah and the whale, attendance of Hollywood films, importance of divine healing, engaging in public demonstrations, divorce and remarriage, speaking in tongues, public display of affection, wearing of mini-skirts, interracial marriage, wearing of makeup by women of the church, wearing of long hair by young men. Respondents were also asked to report the extent to which each issue was presented and/or discussed in an open context within the church. There was a strong tendency for those issues achieving most consensus also to achieve most open discussion. The correlation was .82. Participant observation and interviews supported this finding.

Voices of Black Folk: The Sermons of Rev. A. W. Nix, by Terri Brinegar