Theology and Medicine

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This paper argues that a new genre of therapy has appeared in the arena of contemporary spiritual alternative healing, which expresses an outlook never-before-seen in the history of medicine: postmodern therapy. Postmodern therapeutic methods (PTMs) express a popularization of postmodernist philosophy in regards to language's role in the therapeutic process, expressing a novel cosmology. These methods are illustrated in the paper, and then analyzed in comparison to two other groups of methods: traditional/occult magic, and modern medicine. Finally, PTMs are characterized as neo-magic, bearing features similar to modernistic outlook on the one hand, and features similar to pre-modern magic outlook on the other hand. Thus, these new outlook demonstrate a double appropriation and rejection of perceptions viewed as contradictory – traditional magic and secular science.

The rising number of non-communicable disease (NCDs) is a global health challenge. According to WHO, non-communicable diseases account for 38 million of the 56 million deaths each year. That is more than half of the cause. This includes cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic lung diseases. Health promotion can help address non-communicable disease like the control of hypertension. Health promotion contributes to controlling hypertension “through enabling people, to increase control over their health and its determinants, thereby promoting and sustaining good health. The health education of each clergy member of a particular region will be the health promotion activity effective for this NCD program. The purpose of the campaign is to persuade hypertensive church pastors to adopt a healthy lifestyle. This is best done by teaching individuals about hypertension and equip them with skills how to prevent it.

Much recent Christian theology has sought to reconsider the significance of the body in theological reflection. At the same time, a number of areas of suffering traditionally associated with the experience of sin have come to be reinterpreted, for good reasons, as medical disorders without moral valence. The result is that the doctrine of sin has become increasingly dissociated from the body in contemporary theology. This article addresses this dissociation by exploring the difficulty posed to interpreters by the correlation in Psalms 32 and 38 between unforgiven sin and bodily suffering and dysfunction. After showing that this correlation has been a source of significant difficulties for modern interpreters, the essay concludes by examining the potential of an Augustinian reading of these Psalms in terms of the relationship between mortality and original sin.