New PDF release: Madness: American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness

By Heather H. Vacek

ISBN-10: 1481300571

ISBN-13: 9781481300575

insanity is a sin. The disturbed are avoided. psychological disease isn't the church’s problem.

All 3 claims are wrong.

In Madness, Heather H. Vacek lines the background of Protestant reactions to psychological disorder in the USA. She unearths how precise forces mixed to thwart Christian deal with the entire individual. The professionalization of medication labored to limit the sector of Christian authority to the non-public and non secular nation-states, consigning therapeutic and care—both actual and mental—to secular, scientific experts. both influential, a theological legacy that associated disorder with sin deepened the social stigma surrounding the mentally unwell. The Protestant church, reluctant to interact victims lest it, too, be tainted by means of organization, willingly abdicated deal with the mentally in poor health to secular professionals.

While inattention shaped the final rule, 5 old exceptions to the development of benign forget exemplify Protestant efforts to assert a notably Christian reaction. a detailed exam of the lives and paintings of colonial clergyman Cotton Mather, innovative period healthcare professional Benjamin Rush, nineteenth-century activist Dorothea Dix, pastor and sufferer Anton Boisen, and psychiatrist Karl Menninger maps either the diversity and the development of attentive Protestant care. Vacek chronicles Protestant makes an attempt to make theological feel of affliction (Mather), to craft care as Christian vocation (Rush), to recommend for the helpless (Dix), to reclaim non secular authority (Boisen), and to plead for the mentally in poor health (Menninger).

Vacek’s historic narrative types the foundation for her theological mirrored image approximately modern Christian care of the mentally in poor health and Christian knowing of psychological disease. via demonstrating the gravity of what appeared—and did not appear—on clerical and congregational agendas, Vacek explores how Christians may still navigate the ever-shifting traces of cultural authority as they take care of those that suffer.

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Madness: American Protestant Responses to Mental Illness (Studies in Religion, Theology, and Disability) by Heather H. Vacek


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Categories: Christian Theology