Insight to Heal

Description: - What does healing mean for Christians and others in an age of science? - How can a person relate scientific findings about one's body, philosophical understanding of one's mind, and theological investigations about one's spirit into a coherent and unified model of the person capable of leading one deeper into one's soul? - How does God continue creating through nature and direct one's wandering toward becoming created co-creators capable of ministering to others? The reality of human suffering demands that theology and science mutually inform each other in a shared understanding of nature, humanity, and paths to healing. Mark Graves draws upon systems theory, pragmatic philosophy, and biological and cognitive sciences to distinguish wounds that limit who a person may become, and uses information theory, emergence, and Christian theology to define healing as distinct from a return to a prior state of being and rather instead as creating real possibility in who the person may become. Endorsements: "Mark Graves' new book is a marvel of creative synthesis. He brings together the latest scientific research on suffering and combines it with a deeply sensitive understanding of Christian theology to produce a powerful guide to healing at all levels--physical, mental, spiritual, and cultural. The emphasis on beauty is especially valuable as a reminder that true healing involves a transformative reorientation of the person toward life, nature, and experience. This book offers wonderful resources for therapists, ministers, chaplains, doctors, nurses, and anyone involved in health care. Beyond those practical benefits, Graves has given us a thought-provoking meditation on the twenty-first-century relationship between science and theology." --Kelly Bulkeley Visiting Scholar Graduate Theological Union "This book reads like a contemporary version of Augustine's Confessions. It is grounded in a religious conversion that resulted over time in a remarkable change of life for the individual. Likewise, it incorporates a surprising amount of contemporary philosophy, theology, and natural science (in this case, neuroscience) into a hierarchical system based on the notion of creativity and emergence of new forms. Finally, like the Confessions it takes time to think through and digest." --Joseph Bracken, SJ Professor Emeritus of Theology Xavier University About the Contributor(s): Mark Graves has twenty-five years' experience researching and modeling cognitive, biological, and religious dimensions of the person and has published forty technical and scholarly works in those areas, including Mind, Brain, and the Elusive Soul (2008). He taught at Baylor College of Medicine; the University of California, Berkeley; Santa Clara University; and the Graduate Theological Union, including on healing and science at the Pacific School of Religion.