Exposes the pretension and fraud that surrounds the faith healer business, revealing how alleged faith healers prey on the insecurities and vulnerabilities of the people they preach to.

Manuel Mu�oz's dazzling second collection finds the author returning, once again, to the small towns of California's Central Valley. Set in a neighborhood with characters whose lives often intersect with each other, The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue offers ten stories about a wide range of lives: a mother coping with a mortally injured son after his motorcycle accident; a single father returning from San Francisco and attempting a reconciliation with an estranged sister; a young woman trying to provide safe haven to her cousin fleeing a vicious boyfriend; and a teenager who sees himself in the trials of the town's most-gossiped-about resident. How these characters cross paths reveal a neighborhood shaped by misunderstandings and long-held secrets, and show how a community can be both embracing and unforgiving, revealing a truth about the nature of home: you always live with its history.Stories from The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue were previously published in Epoch, Glimmer Train (marking Manuel's third appearance in this literary journal), Rush Hour, and Swink. His work has appeared in many other journals, including The Massachusetts Review, The Colorado Review, Boston Review, and Puerto del Sol, and has also been broadcast on National Public Radio's Selected Shorts.

This history of evangelical faith healing in nineteenth-century America examines the nation’s shifting attitudes about sickness, suffering, and health. Faith in the Great Physician tells the story of how participants in the divine healing movement transformed the ways Americans coped with physical affliction and pursued bodily wellbeing. Heather D. Curtis offers critical reflection on the theological, cultural, and social forces that come into play when one questions the purpose of suffering and the possibility of healing. Belief in divine healing ran counter to a deep-seated Christian ethic that linked physical suffering with spiritual holiness. By engaging in devotional disciplines and participating in social reform efforts, proponents of faith cure embraced a model of spiritual experience that endorsed active service, rather than passive endurance, as the proper Christian response to illness and pain. Emphasizing the centrality of religious practices to the enterprise of divine healing, Curtis sheds light on the relationship among Christian faith, medical science, and the changing meanings of suffering and healing in American culture. Recipient of the Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History for 2007

A about the life of the faith healer Francis Hardy as monologued through the shifting memories of Hardy, his wife, Grace, and stage manager, Teddy.

Refugia Faith: Seeking Hidden Shelters, Ordinary Wonders, and the Healing of the Earth explores how Christian spirituality and practice must adapt to prepare for life on a climate-altered planet. Refugia (reh-FU-jee-ah) is a biological term describing places of shelter where life endures in times of crisis, such as a volcanic eruption, fire, or stressed climate. Ideally, these refugia endure, expand, and connect so that new life emerges. Debra Rienstra applies this concept to human culture and faith, asking, In this era of ecological devastation, how can Christians become people of refugia? How can we find and nurture these refugia, not only in the biomes of the earth, but in our human cultural systems and in our spiritual lives? How can we apply all our love and creativity to this task as never before? Rienstra recounts her own process of reeducation--beginning not as a scientist or an outdoors enthusiast but by examining the wisdom of theologians and philosophers, farmers and nature writers, scientists and activists, and especially people on the margins. By weaving nature writing, personal narrative, and theological reflection, Rienstra grapples honestly with her own fears and longings and points toward a way forward--a way to transform Christian spirituality and practice, become a healer on a damaged earth, and inspire others to do the same. Refugia Faith speaks to people securely within the faith as well as to those on the edge, providing a suitable entry for those who sense that this era of upheaval requires a transformed faith but who don't quite know where to begin.

This book investigates the growing number of Western followers of John of God, a faith healer who has drawn hundreds of thousands of people, including Oprah Winfrey, to his healing center in Brazil by purportedly performing miraculous surgeries on people with a kitchen knife and no anesthetics. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork throughout Brazil, the US, UK, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand, Cristina Rocha examines the social and cultural forces that have made it possible for an illiterate, mostly unknown faith healer in Brazil to become a global "guru" of the 21st century.

A journalistic quest that begins with the couldn't-be-more-personal experience of her own psychic surgery, Bryan takes the reader from The Faith in God Spiritual Church outside Reno, Nevada to the Pangasinan Province of the Philippines Island of Luzon, famous for its healers who perform surgery without cutting open the body - bare-handed surgery, where no anesthesia is used, and there is no pain, scars, or infection. Even as quantum physicists close in on a scientific description of how it works, Bryan asks: "Is psychic healing a miracle of God or a trickery of fake blood and cotton balls perpetrated by charlatans?" She goes on to explore how it might well be both. This is an open, honest, in-depth look at the multiple, often contradictory realities of faith healing and the ripples it casts into the realms of physics, metaphysics, spirituality, and higher consciousness. Into this heartfelt first person account of a life-changing journey from patient to student to sometimes teacher, Bryan weaves a parallel narrative full of historical detail and cultural perspective on telekinesis, the magnetic force of cells, trance mediums, miracles, the placebo effect, and the power of expectation, as well as minor and major deities on the order of John of God, Franz Mesmer, Emanuel Swedenborg, Albert Einstein, and Shirley MacLaine.