The Secular Care of the Self
eBook - PDF
Available until 31 Dec |Learn more

The Secular Care of the Self

Discipline and Its Discontents across the Protestant Atlantic

  1. 176 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF
Available until 31 Dec |Learn more

The Secular Care of the Self

Discipline and Its Discontents across the Protestant Atlantic

About this book

The modern desire to care for our health, so obvious to its proponents, has its discontents. Secular medicine denounces the work of those who claim the protective powers of spirits or the Holy Spirit. In this contestation over what it means to care for oneself, Ian Whitmarsh offers an unorthodox thesis: the modern secular desire toward health is founded in a Protestant congregationalism that shapes its refusal of spirit manifestation, revelation, and the power of deities to shape the world. This proper healthy ethics and aesthetics is then taught to those who lack choice in their continuing to live through these ontologies. Whitmarsh explores these dynamics of power and spirit as they move across the Atlantic, from northern Europe to North America to the country of Trinidad and Tobago. Trinidad offers a broken mirror to the ostensibly secular global endeavor of the desire to be healthy. This mirror shows that the threat found in the spirits and practitioners of other religions, such as Pentecostal healing and orisha manifestation, reveals racialized Protestant commitments masked within a modern global "secular" care of the self.

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Yes, you can access The Secular Care of the Self by Ian Whitmarsh in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Medical Theory, Practice & Reference. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half title
  3. Title
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. Acknowledgments
  7. Introduction: The Secular Desire for Health
  8. Chapter 1. Protestant Care of the Self
  9. Chapter 2. Working with the Spirit, Spirits, and the Secular
  10. Chapter 3. Health and Its Involuntary Other
  11. Chapter 4. Congregational Life
  12. Chapter 5. The Paradoxical Will and Its Discontents
  13. Conclusion: Desecularizing Hermeneutics?
  14. Notes
  15. References
  16. Index