Faith That Heals: Stories of God's Love, by H. Jane Teas, Ph.D.
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Synopsis:
This book is the result of a study conducted by the Author, Dr. Jane Teas, and
her collaborators, at the South Carolina Cancer Center, in Columbia, SC. The
study explored the role that faith plays in healing, through hundreds of
interviews of Christians in the Columbia, SC area. All study participants
gave informed consent to the use of their stories for the purposes of the study,
and for publication. Names were altered to protect confidentiality. This work
yielded 107 original stories of faith and healing, 45 of which are presented in
this collection. Since the interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed, the
stories are presented almost exactly as they were told. The original transcripts
of all the interviews conducted have been deposited in the permanent research
collection of the Smithsonian Museum of American History.
From the Introduction, by Dr. Jane Teas:
"In our project discussions and dinner forums, I tried intellectually to pin down issues of faith and healing, all in the absence of any real experience of having been healed by faith. After a few months, the project moved on to the work of interviewing people who had been healed by God. For the next three years, we listened to people who were willing to share their stories. The project profoundly affected each of our lives, in some cases leading from disbelief to belief, in others to a greater appreciation of existing personal faith" (page 12)
"With all of human history before us, and all the beliefs and variations on beliefs of people living today, we had to set limits on what we could hope to explore in depth. Because five of the interviewers had been raised in Christian traditions, we had some personal familiarity with the Bible and stories of Biblical healing and decided to limit our study to Christians living near us in Columbia and/or their friends. But even within those definitions, we found differences of opinion and experience. Expanding on a quotation by William Blake, the 18thcentury poet, “To see a World in a Grain of Sand,” a friend of mine once added, you must first see the grain of sand. And in the grain of Christian Columbia, South Carolina sand, we indeed found a world of healing testimonies as diverse as any landscape we had ever imagined. Here we present the highlights of our journey, the dramas of everyday Christian life as it is practiced in just one small area of the world at the turn of the millennium. " (page 13)