Healing Narratives


Book Description

Exploring the relationship between culture and health, this text provides readings of the works of five women writers, tracing their common structure of a main character moving from a state of mental or physical disease toward wellness through reconnection with her cultural traditions.




Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives


Book Description

Ancestral Voices, Healing Narratives: Female Ghosts in Contemporary US and Caribbean Fiction examines four novels by Erna Brodber, Zoé Valdés, Sandra Cisneros, and Maryse Condé. In this unique comparative analysis, Kristina S. Gibby explores the significance of female ghosts—specifically maternal figures, who haunt female narrators, inspiring them to transcribe the dead’s obfuscated (hi)stories and recover their family memory. The author argues that these female ghosts subvert historiographic power structures through a matrilineal succession of knowledge via oral traditions of storytelling, inevitably broadening historical consciousness and asserting the value of fiction in the face of historical rupture. Gibby contends that in form and content, these novels disrupt patriarchal and Western expectations of time and epistemology. They favor cyclical temporality (highlighted by the spirits’ uncanny return), which underscores relational understanding and challenges the exclusive and limiting constraints of linear time. This book makes important contributions to inter-American literary criticism with its narrow focus on female authors who confront the horrors of history through maternal spirits.




Claiming Knowledge


Book Description

This volume deals with the transformation of unchurched religious creativity in the late modern West. It analyzes the ways in which the advance of science, globalization and individualism have fundamentally reshaped esoteric religious traditions, from theosophy to the New Age. This publication has also been published in paperback, please click here for details.




Narrative Discipleship


Book Description

Narrative Discipleship examines the thematic and theological impact of women in the Gospel of Mark. Using narrative analysis, Aernie explores how Mark intentionally crafts the narratives of women in the Gospel to extend his portrait of discipleship. Mark portrays these women as exemplars of four key aspects of discipleship--restored life, kingdom speech, sacrificial action, and cruciformity. These portraits of discipleship provide a transformative paradigm for Mark's audience. Mark creates a portrait of narrative discipleship as a means to encourage his audience toward embodied discipleship and faithful participation in God's in-breaking kingdom.




Healing Stories for Challenging Behaviour


Book Description

Healing Stories for Challenging Behaviour brings together the fruits of Susan Perrow's work in storymaking. It is richly illustrated with lively anecdotes drawn from parents and teachers who have discovered how the power of story can help resolve a range of common childhood behaviours and situations such as separation anxiety, bullying, sibling rivalry, nightmares and grieving.




Women Healing/Healing Women


Book Description

'Women Healing/ Healing Women' begins with a search for women who were healers in the Graeco-Roman world of the late Hellenistic and early Roman period. Women healers were honoured in inscriptions and named by medical writers, and were familiar enough to be stereotyped in plays and other writings. What emerges by the first century of the Common Era is a world in which women functioned as healers but where healing becomes a contested site for gender relations. By the time the gospels are written the place of women as healers is effectively erased. The book uses the historical and cultural evidence to re-read the gospel texts and discover healers in a woman pouring out ointment, healed women bearing on their bodies the language describing Jesus, and even in women possessed by demons.




Healing, Weakness, and Power


Book Description

Healing by Jesus and the apostles is not a popular subject for biblical studies today, but the importance of healing in the first-century eastern Roman Empire was enormous. In the New Testament writings of Mark, Luke and Paul we find considerable variation in their use of divine healing. With respect to Jesus' healing, Mark and Luke both emphasize it, but differ in their representation of its purpose and source. Also, Mark's accounts of Jesus' healing combine with his overall description in the Gospel to underline his theological view (a theologia crucis), while Luke depicts healing as showing primarily the glory of God (although a theologia crucis is also present) and he presents the theological aspect of Jesus' healing within each healing narrative. Healing in the early church is then compared in Acts and Paul's undisputed letters. Luke continues to emphasize the power and evidential value of healing in spreading the gospel. Paul, instead, emphasizes the 'essence' of Jesus' ministry, love and compassion, and underplays healing, both by himself and by members of the churches he planted. The main reason for this seems to be because of his 'thorn in the flesh'; his physical weakness demonstrates that the gospel truth shines only because of Christ's influence. Paul's illness probably also sensitizes him to the risk of healing becoming a power which could compromise a fellowship based on love and equality. Finally, the legacy of Jesus' healing is considered briefly over the subsequent few centuries.




Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal


Book Description

We live in a world where conversations about trauma are becoming commonplace and adopted people are using their voices to educate the general public about the effects of maternal separation and genealogical bewilderment. But for many adult adoptees the act of speaking truth to power is still fraught. Personal writing can unlock long held silences and help adult adoptees feel empowered to rewrite their narratives. The need to deconstruct dominant narratives about adoption and its inherent loss and trauma is necessary if we are to reform an institution that has damaged many generations of mothers and children. Because many adoptees do not have access to adoption and trauma competent therapists, writing is an accessible therapeutic modality that can be used to reframe narratives that position adoptees as the object rather than the subject. Adult Adoptees and Writing to Heal shares the framework and method of using writing as a practice for adult adoptees, therapists, teachers, and researchers interested in learning how to migrate and heal embodied trauma. It analyzes lived experience and the author’s own writing to develop a methodology for moving toward wholeness by writing and speaking the truth of internal adoptee experiences.




101 Healing Stories for Kids and Teens


Book Description

A comprehensive guide to understanding and using storytelling in therapy with kids and teens "George Burns is a highly experienced clinician with the remarkable ability to create, discover, and tell engaging stories that can teach us all the most important lessons in life. With 101 Healing Stories for Kids and Teens, he strives especially to help kids and teens learn these life lessons early on, providing them opportunities for getting help and even learning to think preventively." -Michael D. Yapko, PhD | Author of Breaking the Patterns of Depression and Hand-Me-Down Blues "George Burns takes the reader on a wonderful journey, balancing metaphor, good therapeutic technique, and empirical foundations during the trip. Given that Burns utilizes all three aspects of the Confucian story referred to in the book-teaching, showing, and involving-readers should increase their understanding of how stories can be used therapeutically." -Richard G. Whiteside, MSW | Author of The Art of Using and Losing Control and Working with Difficult Clients: A Practical Guide to Better Therapy "A treasure trove for parents and for professionals in the child-development fields." -Jeffrey K. Zeig, PhD | Director, The Milton H. Erickson Foundation Stories can play an important and potent role in therapy with children and adolescents-helping them develop the skills to cope with and survive a myriad of life situations. In many cases, stories provide the most effective means of communicating what kids and teens might not want to discuss directly. 101 Healing Stories for Kids and Teens provides straightforward advice on using storytelling and metaphors in a variety of therapeutic settings. Ideal for all who work with young people, this unique resource can be combined with other inventive and evidence-based techniques such as play, art, music, and drama therapies as well as solution focused, hypnotic, and cognitive-behavioral approaches. Offering guidance for new clinicians and seasoned professionals, George Burns's latest work delivers a unique combination-information on incorporating storytelling in therapy, dozens of ready-made stories, and tips for creating original therapeutic stories. Innovative chapters include: * Guidance for effective storytelling * Using metaphors effectively * Where to get ideas for healing stories * Planning and presenting healing stories * Teaching parents to use healing stories In addition, 101 Healing Stories for Kids and Teens includes dozens of story ideas designed to address a variety of issues, such as: * Enriching learning * Teaching self-care * Changing patterns of behavior * Managing relationships, emotions, and life challenges * Creating helpful thoughts * Developing life skills and problem-solving techniques




Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing


Book Description

Galen is the most important physician of the Roman imperial era. Many of his theories and practices were the basis for medical knowledge for centuries after his death and some practices—like checking a patient’s pulse—are still used today. He also left a vast corpus of writings which makes up a full one-eighth of all surviving ancient Greek literature. Through her readings of hundreds of Galen’s case histories, Susan P. Mattern presents the first systematic investigation of Galen’s clinical practice. Galen’s patient narratives illuminate fascinating interplay among the craft of healing, social class, professional competition, ethnicity, and gender. Mattern describes the public, competitive, and masculine nature of medicine among the urban elite and analyzes the relationship between clinical practice and power in the Roman household. She also finds that although Galen is usually perceived as self-absorbed and self-promoting, his writings reveal him as sensitive to the patient’s history, symptoms, perceptions, and even words. Examining his professional interactions in the context of the world in which he lived and practiced, Galen and the Rhetoric of Healing provides a fresh perspective on a foundational figure in medicine and valuable insight into how doctors thought about their patients and their practice in the ancient world.