Jesus the Village Psychiatrist or There Are No Secrets

Jesus the Village Psychiatrist

Author: Donald Capps

All of the Gospels and the whole of Christian tradition depict Jesus as a miraculous healer who can cure blindness, leprosy, hemorrhages, and a host of other maladies. But how did Jesus actually heal? In this fascinating book, Donald Capps argues that Jesus was keenly attuned to the psychological causes of illness and through his ministry brought healing to body and soul alike.

Capps argues that one of Jesus' purposes was to heal people from mental illnesses, which people in the ancient world would have called possessions and seen manifested in physical ailments such as blindness, paralysis, or other symptoms. As Capps argues, Jesus' mission involved attending to and overcoming the various psychological and cultural causes behind these illnesses.

Fully engaged in historical Jesus scholarship, Capps carefully examines Jesus' deep concern for both physical and emotional health and shows how his proclamation of the kingdom of God envisioned a world without mental illness.

About the Author:
Donald Capps is William Harte Felmeth Professor of Pastoral Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey

Graham Christian Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information - School Library Journal

Jesus has worn so many masks-country boy, unacknowledged king, sex magician-that it can hardly surprise us to see him don another. Capps (pastoral theology, Princeton Theological Seminary) selects several of Jesus's "healing miracles" and makes of them something not beyond the order of nature but prodigies of psychological and psychiatric insight and healing. Capps is necessarily reliant on Freud's definitions of hysteria-broadly rejected by his own profession-so his analysis has a shaky foundation. Yet the kernel of his idea is striking, and this provocative study may give rise to others with better grounding.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     xi
Somatoform Disorders
From Psychosomatic Illness to Somatoform Disorders     3
A Short History of Hysteria     15
Freud's Writings on Conversion Disorder     27
Jesus Cures
Two Paralyzed Men     37
Two Blind Men     57
The Demon-Possessed Boy     81
Jairus's Daughter and the Hemorrhaging Woman     105
Epilogue: The Woman Who Cared for Jesus     133
References     137
Index     141

Go to: Triple Cross or I Write What I like

There Are No Secrets: Professor Cheng Man-Ch'ing and His TaiI Chi Chuan

Author: Wolfe Lowenthal

"Wolfe Lowenthal's quiet little memoir will with window-opening wisdom reinforce, I think, my view of how Cheng stood on Tai Chi. It tells how a young writer reacted to this strange Chinese man when he appeared in New York City in the mid-1960s and stayed there for a decade before returning to Taiwan to die in 1975. In a nickel town where neurosis is a cardinal virtue, the Tai Chi center established by Cheng soon became an oasis of learning. In my visits there I was invariably approached by a quiet fellow with a ready smile and loads of questions. His form and sensing hands improved but he never lost his kindly ways. This led me once to tell the three seniors that the one person in the club who best exemplified Tai Chi was this junior. That man who has since become a teacher of the art is the author if this book."
-Robert W. Smith, from the Preface