The Uncommon Touch - Hardcover

Harpur, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771039441 ISBN 13: 9780771039447

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 1994

Synopsis

Long ago – before there were doctors, pharmacists, and hospitals – religion and medicine were one, and physical and spiritual ailments were treated alike. Most world religions practised healing, including the early Christian Church, which followed Jesus Christ’s examples of miraculous healings of the lame and the blind. But, to its cost, the modern Church has largely forgotten its healing role, says Tom Harpur in The Uncommon Touch, a powerful and persuasive investigation of spiritual healing.

Today in the West, medical science and bogus faith-healings have made the idea of spiritual healing almost laughable. Yet the ancient practice of the laying-on of hands is not only still performed, it is now gaining credibility, even among physicians and other sceptics, most notably in Britain.

In The Uncommon Touch, Harpur investigates the religious roots of spiritual healing and looks at the remarkable work and ideas of modern healers. He also describes the many scientific studies that demonstrate clearly the healing and nurturing power of this astonishing phenomenon and verify that something more than the power of suggestion is at work. These include experiments showing increased growth in yeasts that have received the laying-on of hands and documentation of the effectiveness of Therapeutic Touch, a technique used by more than 30,000 nurses in North America.

Using the spirit to help heal the body’s ills is an old idea – one whose time has come again.

About this title

About the Author

A former Rhodes scholar and professor of New Testament studies at Wycliffe College, Toronto, Tom Harpur is also an Anglican priest. He resigned from parish work in 1979 to write full-time in the mass media, in the process extending his “parish” to the whole of Canada. His work in newspapers, television, and his books, notably For Christ’s Sake and Life After Death, have consolidated his reputation as one of Canada’s pre-eminent religious voices and as a sound spiritual guide for modern times.

From Kirkus Reviews

A Canadian writer on religion, Harpur (God Help Us, Life After Death, etc.) here challenges doctors and other health care professionals ``to look beyond conventional approaches to a much wider paradigm or model of healing''--a paradigm he does not actually present. Harpur also challenges the reader to look inward and become a channel for his or her own healing. He writes of the laying-on of hands and religious rites such as prayer, visualization, meditation, and ``the cultivation of the inner, spiritual qualities of hope, faith, love, forgiveness, courage, purpose, and meaning.'' His absolute bedrock conviction is that ``all healing is self- healing'' and the human organism is self-renewing: ``Our total organism wants and wills health.'' Before becoming a journalist, Harpur was an Anglican parish priest and practiced laying-on of hands. Here he seriously seeks a medical use for the healing phenomenon. First he exposes frauds and charlatans (Oral Roberts, Peter Popoff), although he admits that these fakers sometimes channel real cures. He reviews the Judaic and Gospel traditions and finds in them healing on many levels, from the individual to the cosmic. He profiles the blind healer Godfrey Mowatt, portraying him as a well-rounded, socially engaged person before revealing the full scope of Mowatt's thought, which holds that inner healing precedes the physical and often comes about by the ``healee'' becoming a channel for healing others. Among scientific ideas, he relates Wilhelm Reich's orgone theory of bioenergies, which so intrigued Canadian biologist Bernard Grad that he then set out to verify the spiritual side of healing. Harpur also eyes psychiatric healing, touch therapy, and traditional healing in China, concluding that ``the Ultimate Ground of the universe is with you.'' An earnest proclamation that the life force can renew when asked. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0771039441
• ISBN 13: 9780771039447
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 275