Duhovno iscjeliteljstvo u vjerskoj zajednici Radosna vijest
Spiritual Healing in the Religious Community "Radosna vijest"

Summary/Abstract: Among numerous so called alternative (in the sense of an alternative to official medicine and science) approaches to human life and health, that have been established in Zagreb during last years, christian spiritual healing has it's own place as a cultural, social, and psychological phenomenon. Ideological confrontation of communism and religion in the society of post-war Croatia was inconvenient for the popularization of religious phenomenology. But political and ideological changes on one side, and the expansion of the idea of "New age" (with supporting publications and backing of media), during the last decade opened the way for the spiritual phenomenology. Based at the analysis of the spiritual healing practice of a pentecostal church "Radosna vijest", the paper introduces a definition of spiritual healing wide enough to cover such practices ranging from shamanism to Christianity. It is defined as an intervention of sacred authority into ones health condition (physical, psychical or spiritual), by the means of religious symbolic system, in order to remove a certain anomaly of that condition. In this regard, all those practices (like ablutions on holy places, kissing of relics etc.) which include the urge of "profane" (ill) human existence for coming in contact with recognized "sacred" (spiritual healer, holy places or objects), are seen as a manifestation of the same mythological reasoning: infusion of sacred into a profanized reality.

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