Title: The sacred self
First published: 1994
Description: "How does religious healing work, if indeed it does? What is actually being healed by the performances of the shaman, the medicine man, or the faith healer? In this study of the contemporary North American movement known as the Catholic Charismatic Renewal, Thomas Csordas offers new insight into the experiential specificity that defines efficacy in therapeutic ritual performance.

This is not only a book about healing, however, but also one about the phenomenology of self and self-transformation."--BOOK JACKET.

"The Catholic Charismatic Renewal is a movement that incorporates Pentecostal practices into Catholicism. In the nearly three decades since its inception, the movement has developed a system that includes several genres of healing: physical healing, emotional healing, and deliverance from evil spirits.

Blending ethnographic description and detailed case studies within these various healing genres, Csordas works out a theory of self and therapeutic efficacy grounded in the notions of embodiment and orientation. With this theory he examines the experience of sensory imagery and performative utterance and explicates the sense of the sacred that is cultivated by participation in this coherent ritual system."--BOOK JACKET.

"The system in turn is embedded in the Charismatic world of meaning within which the sacred self comes into being: to be healed is to inhabit the Charismatic world as a sacred self."--BOOK JACKET.

"Csordas calls his approach "cultural phenomenology" because it is concerned with synthesizing the immediacy of embodied existence with the multiplicity of cultural meaning in which we are always and inevitably immersed. This innovative book forms the basis for a rapprochement between phenomenology and semiotics in culture theory. It will interest anthropologists, philosophers, psychologists, physicians, and students of comparative religion and healing."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Pentecostalism, Spiritual healing, Church history, Identification (Religion), Self, Catholic Church, History, Mouvement charismatique, Histoire, Umschulungswerkstätten für Siedler und Auswanderer, Charismatische Bewegung, Religion and Psychology, Église catholique, Histoire religieuse, Paranormale geneeswijzen, Mental Healing, Charismatische bewegingen, Katholische Pfingstbewegung, Glaubensheilung, Katholische Kirche, Guérison par la foi, Rooms-Katholieke Kerk, Moi (Psychologie), Christianisme, Catholic church, united states, history, New england, church history, Ego (Psychology), Religious aspects
Places: New England
Time periods: 1965-
LC classification: BT732.5 .C86 1994