Death and Life in America
Biblical Healing and Biomedicine
- Science & Faith
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Published: 2024
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Publisher's Description
Family physician Raymond Downing offers a bold critique of western medicine and sees medical care as one of the fallen "principalities and powers" in need of redemption. But Downing's hope lies beyond biomedicine--in biblical healing, especially the healing miracles of Jesus. In conversation with the Bible, Ivan Illich, William Strongfellow, Susan Sontag, and others, Downing revisits how Westerners approach medicine. He sees suffering and healing as essentially spiritual experiences at the roots of death and life.
Endorsements (5)
“In this book, Raymond Downing as physician-educator perceptively lays down a foundation for a critical dialogue among thinking people. This book is a wake-up call for followers of Jesus in medicine to become engaged.”
“I strongly endorse this book and believe it will be of great interest to many readers. As a Christian college advisor to undergraduate students who are preparing for future careers in medicine, I can recommend this book as an illustration of how one meaningfully blends faith with medical practice.”
“A Christian application of the two-kingdom (upside-down) approach to healthcare and end of life issues simplifies the complexity of dealing with issues related to death and dying. Must reading for anyone interested in the high cost of American healthcare related to one’s last year of life.”
“In this remarkable little book, Raymond Downing puts biomedicine under the lens, not of the scientist’s microscope, but of the narrative of the Christian Bible. The ascetic path he proposes requires a radical reconfiguring of the place of biomedicine in human life. But if this path were followed by even a tiny proportion of physicians in America, those physicians might become to contemporary medicine what the Hippocratic reform movement was to the corrupted medicine of ancient Greece.”
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