The Healing Of A Culture

Father Spitzer, President of Gonzaga University, has been using the principles in this book over the last eight years to educate people of all backgrounds in the philosophy of the pro-life movement. The tremendous positive response he has received inspired him to start the Life Principles Institute. This book is one of the key resources used for this program. This work effectively draws out the connections between personal attitudes toward happiness and the meaning of life, and the larger cultural issues such as freedom and human rights. Relying on the wisdom of the ages and respecting the human persons' unique capacity for rational analysis, this work offers definitions of the key cultural terms affecting life issues, including Happiness, Success, Love, Suffering, Quality of Life, Ethics, Freedom, Personhood, Human Rights and the Common Good.

Abstract: An historical perspective of disease and healing practices as related to culture is addressed in 57 papers for students and professionals in the medical and health fields. The papers are organized among 14 major themes, addressing: medical anthropology; paleopathology; disease ecology and epidemiology; medical systems and theories relative to disease and therapy; sociocultural influences and ethnic practices in disease diagnosis; sorcery and witchcraft; disease prevention via social controls; surgery practices and population control in the preindustrial era; cultural and environmental factors relative to stress, pain, and death; cultural influences on behavioral disorders; the special role of the inflicted in society; and current primitive healing practices and the impact of sociocultural change on such practices. (wz).

The Spanish expression - la cultura cura (culture heals) - is an affirmation of the potential healing power of a variety of cultural practices that together constitute the ethos of a people. What happens, however, when cultures themselves are in jeopardy? What are the "antidotes" or healing modalities for an ailing culture? Healing Cultures addresses these questions from a variety of disciplines - anthropology, holistic folk traditions, literature, film, cultural and religious studies - bringing together the broad range of beliefs and the spectrum of practices that have sustained the peoples and cultures of the Caribbean.

Explicitly dealing with the religious aspects of healing and healers, this unique and intriguing book examines illness, healing, and religion in cross-cultural perspective by looking at how sickness is understood and treated in a wide variety of cultures. Centered around three principle themes, the text: A) illustrates how crucial it is to frame illness in a meaningful context in every culture and how this process is almost always bound up with religious, spiritual, and moral concerns; B) shows how many beliefs, strategies, and practices that characterize traditional cultures also appear in Christianity, putting healing in the Christian tradition in a broad, rational context, and; C) discusses the continuities between traditional, explicitly religious, and modern medical cultures -- demonstrating that many features of modern scientific medicine are symbolic and ritualistic, and that many aspects and practices of modern medicine are similar to healing as seen in traditional, pre-scientific medical cultures. For those in the religious, anthropological and medical professions.

It can no longer be overlooked that today's cultural soul is sick and in need of healing. Like the group soul, the cultural soul is made up of the souls of its members, miraculously creating a whole that is always more than the sum of its parts. Since every man is a part of the cultural soul, he can also contribute to the healing of the cultural soul. This only requires the belief that natural life on earth is something marvellous that is worth fighting for. As every doctor knows, an illness can only ever be cured satisfactorily once it has been adequately analysed and understood. In order for a person to come to such an understanding in relation to today's culture, they must come to terms with some unpleasant cultural realities. One of these unpleasant realities is that fascism, which can be traced back directly to Roman rule, is today one of the major causes of the illness of the cultural soul in almost every country in the world. It is therefore not enough to merely operate on the surface of everyday cultural life, as the healing of the cultural soul requires a sufficient analysis of an ideological cultural heritage that has become "self-evident". Only when the individual realises that a large part of this cultural heritage consists of completely arbitrary, unnatural and pathological ideas can he or she throw his or her natural weight and voice into the scales of cultural development and generate an important healing effect for the cultural soul. This book provides all the necessary information for this.