title: Making God real and making God good: some mechanisms through which prayer may contribute to healing.
abstract: Many social scientists attribute the health-giving properties of religious practice to social support. This paper argues that another mechanism may be a positive relationship with the supernatural, a proposal that builds upon anthropological accounts of symbolic healing. Such a mechanism depends upon the learned cultivation of the imagination and the capacity to make what is imagined more real and more good. This paper offers a theory of the way that prayer enables this process and provides some evidence, drawn from experimental and ethnographic work, for the claim that a relationship with a loving God, cultivated through the imagination in prayer, may contribute to good health and may contribute to healing in trauma and psychosis.
authors.affiliation: Stanford University.
authors.forename: Tanya Marie
authors.initials: TM
authors.lastname: Luhrmann
mesh_terms: D029221:Faith Healing; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D011618:Psychotic Disorders; D012069:Religion and Psychology; D012944:Social Support; D040921:Stress Disorders, Traumatic; D013315:Stress, Psychological; D013561:Symbolism
keywords: healing; prayer; psychosis; trauma