Welcome to “Health and Healing in the Christian Tradition”!
This course addresses the intersection of religion and medicine throughout the two-thousand-year history of Christianity. In this course you will learn about Christian approaches to health and healing, death and dying, as they have been rooted in specific expressions of the Christian religion across time. The study begins during the time the Bible was recorded and continues to contemporary views of health and healing. Along the way, you will see how views of health and healing have evolved over time and interacted with broader cultural events, such as wars, political development, philosophical trends, plagues, and natural disasters. As such, you will be able to identify distinct approaches to health, medicine, therapy, and even death. The focus of this course is on the Christian tradition, but other religious traditions have had their own histories with health and healing.
At some points in our study, the history of other religions and spiritualties will intersect with the history of Christianity, but this course will maintain its emphasis on the Christian tradition. You will successfully meet the course objectives by reading the assigned literature carefully, accurately recalling events, people, and ideas, and by interpreting and synthesizing the material verbally and in written form.