Meanings of Healing: Experiences of Prayer-Team Members at the Christian Healing Rooms Service in Finland

Is the inner healing movement in Lithuania a local religious response to the cultural trauma of Socialism?

“…For example, famous Lakota holy man Nicolas Black Elk relates about the mystical vision he had in his youth, and the necessity to re-enact it in a symbolic and theatrical way. 18 From these examples (to mention just a few) a conclusion can be made that every traumatic experience "reaches" for a tangible ritualistic expression, without which it cannot be realized, perceived as an integral part of human journey, and healed. Based on these observations it can be argued that one of the important goals of ritual activity is theatrical symbolic re-enactment of what is perceived as the most dramatic, overwhelming, or even traumatic facts of reality.…”

Charismatic Christianity in Finland, Norway, and Sweden

“…The number of these congregations is currently estimated to be over 100. However, the instability and mobility in the Charismatic scene makes it very difficult to give exact figures (Hovi 2009;Ketola 2007).…”

“…There is, on the one hand, a vibrant congregational field inhabited by numerous independent local communities and evangelizing organizations. On the other hand, the Charismatic Renewal and similar alternative activities are found within the mainline church, albeit to varying degrees of organization and autonomy (Hovi 2009;Hovi and Haapalainen 2015).…”

Reinscribing the Lived Body: A Qualitative Study of Extraordinary Religious Healing Experiences in Norwegian Contexts

“…This diversity is also reflected in the research field, in which empirical studies are often limited to particular aspects of healing experiences. Such research includes, for instance, case studies of spontaneous remission of specific diseases like cancer (Brown 2012b), studies of distinct practices like healing prayer services (Brown 2012a;Hovi 2015;Hovi and Westerink 2013;Kleiven et al 2019) or personal, distant prayers for health issues (Jors et al 2015), and studies of specific outcomes like healing without any remaining biomedical illness (Hvidt 2002a(Hvidt , 2002b. 1 Contrary to such specific investigations, the present article is based on a qualitative study that aimed to explore religious healing experiences across diverse cases.…”