Therapeutic and therapeia within Orthodox Christianity
Year: 2019

Significant scholarship has illustrated that the modern self-help and therapeutic ethos originates in Protestant Christianity. For instance, the prolific American self-help genre with its positive thinking can be traced back to late 19th century religious manuals, in which readers were encouraged to control and direct their thoughts so that they ‘mirrored’ the intentions of God. This chapter suggests that therapeutic knowledge and practices within Finnish Orthodoxy are best understood through th