Did You Know?
- People who attend church regularly are hospitalized much less often than people who never or rarely participate in religious services.
- The deeper a person’s religious faith, the less likely he or she is to be crippled by depression during and after hospitalization for physical illness.
- Religious people have healthier lifestyles and tend to live longer.
- Religious faith appears to protect the elderly from the two major afflictions of later life: cardiovascular disease and cancer.
From the book The Healing Connection: The Story of a Physician’s Search for the Link Between Faith and Health by Harold G. Koenig, MD (Templeton Foundation Press, 2004). (Dr. Koenig is not affiliated with CTCA.)
Not all that long ago, you'd have had a hard time finding a research institute, an academic department or even a decent conference exploring the link between spirituality and health. And with good reason. Health is science, spirituality is something else entirely, and people who say otherwise clearly need to sit down with a medical journal or two.
To read more, click here.
If you've ever prayed so hard that you've lost all sense of a larger world outside yourself, that's your parietal lobe at work. If you've ever meditated so deeply that you'd swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, that's your parietal too.
To read more, click here.
To read September 2008 testimony about Religion, Spirituality and Public Health…by Harold G. Koenig, M.D., Subcommittee on Research and Science Education of the U.S. House of Representatives, click here.
Suggested Reading
- From Medicine to Miracle: How My Faith Overcame Cancer by Mary Self and Rod Chaytor (HarperCollins UK, 2002)
- Faith, Hope & Cancer: A Survivor’s Tips by Carol Westfahl (Goblin Fern Press, 2006)
- Why Faith Matters by David J. Wolpe (HarperOne, 2008)
- Medicine, Religion, and Health by Harold G. Koenig, MD (Templeton Foundation Press, 2008)
- Spirituality in Patient Care: Why, How, When, and What by Harold G. Koenig, MD (Templeton Foundation Press, 2007)
- Prayer, Faith, and Healing: Cure Your Body, Heal Your Mind, and Restore Your Soul by Kenneth Winston Caine and Brian Paul Kaufman (Rodale Books, 1999)
- God, Faith, and Health: Exploring the Spirituality-Healing Connection by Jeff Levin , paperback (August 2002)