Insight to Heal: Co-Creating Beauty amidst Human Suffering

An imaginative synthesis of science and theology that establishes the growth and flourishing of the person as the cornerstone of Christian healing.

What does healing mean for Christians and others in an age of science? How can we combine scientific findings about our bodies, philosophical understanding of our minds and theological investigations about our spirits with a coherent and unified model of the person? How does God continue to create through nature and direct our wandering towards 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. In Insight to Heal, Mark Graves draws upon systems theory, pragmatic philosophy, and biological and cognitive sciences to deal with wounds that could limit personal growth, and uses information theory, emergence, and Christian theology to define healing as distinct from a return to a prior state of being, but rather to create real possibility in who the person may become.

Mark Graves has twenty-five years of experience in researching and modelling 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 has 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. He is currently Research Fellow at Fuller Theological Seminary.