Sep 19, 2018

Event: Health and Healing in Minority Religions.

Inform Seminar
Inform Seminar – Saturday 24th November 2018.

This seminar will explore a range of religious models of health and healing, and to what extent these are related to what practitioners actually do with the aim of preventing and curing diseases of the body and the mind. Many minority religions provide their members with a comprehensive worldview in which beliefs and practices concerning health and healing are incorporated in religious beliefs. Perceptions of body, mind and soul, and their relationships are intricately entwined with a supernatural or transcendent realm.

At one end of a spectrum, there are religious traditions that consider the body a temple and who consider maintaining its health through lifestyle and diet a form of worship. At the other end, there are those who consider the body inferior to the spiritual or cognitive realm, and not of primary importance. Then there are those who believe in possession of the body by evil spirits to be a source of illness, and there are those who believe in ‘faith healing’ and associated practices.

Some of these positions will be explored at this seminar, which will include presentations by academics, academic researchers, and members of Christian Science and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Sarah Harvey
Senior Research Officer
Inform
Inform@kcl.ac.uk
020 7848 1132
c/o Dept. of Theology and Religious Studies, King’s College London
Virginia Woolf Building, 22 Kingsway, London WC2B 6LE.

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