Insight to Heal: Co-Creating Beauty Amidst Human Suffering

Description: - What does healing mean for Christians and others in an age of science? - How can a person relate scientific findings about ones body philosophical understanding of ones mind and theological investigations about ones spirit into a coherent and unified model of the person capable of leading one deeper into ones soul? - How does God continue creating through nature and direct ones wandering toward 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. Mark Graves draws upon systems theory pragmatic philosophy and biological and cognitive sciences to distinguish wounds that limit who a person may become and uses information theory emergence and Christian theology to define healing as distinct from a return to a prior state of being and rather instead as creating real possibility in who the person may become. Endorsements: Mark Graves new book is a marvel of creative synthesis. He brings together the latest scientific research on suffering and combines it with a deeply sensitive understanding of Christian theology to produce a powerful guide to healing at all levels--physical mental spiritual and cultural. The emphasis on beauty is especially valuable as a reminder that true healing involves a transformative reorientation of the person toward life nature and experience. This book offers wonderful resources for therapists ministers chaplains doctors nurses and anyone involved in health care. Beyond those practical benefits Graves has given us a thought-provoking meditation on the twenty-first-century relationship between science and theology. --Kelly Bulkeley Visiting Scholar Graduate Theological Union This book reads like a contemporary version of Augustines Confessions. It is grounded in a religious conversion that resulted over time in a remarkable change of life for the individual. Likewise it incorporates a surprising amount of contemporary philosophy theology and natural science (in this case neuroscience) into a hierarchical system based on the notion of creativity and emergence of new forms. Finally like the Confessions it takes time to think through and digest. --Joseph Bracken SJ Professor Emeritus of Theology Xavier University About the Contributor(s): Mark Graves has twenty-five years experience researching and modeling 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 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.