“Instant Miracles are Rare, but It Happened to Me”

The Marian Faith Healing Ministry, under the leadership of the excommunicated Catholic priest Felicien Nkwera, is dedicated to the fight against demons, illness, and corruption. It is a small, but fairly well-known group in Tanzania and enjoys some notoriety due to its propagation of exorcism. At th...

Full description

Saved in:  
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Wilkens, Katharina (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Check availability: HBZ Gateway
Journals Online & Print:
Drawer...
Fernleihe:Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste
Published: Brill 2018
In: Numen
Year: 2018, Volume: 65, Issue: 2/3, Pages: 207-231
Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains:B Nkwera, Felician V. M. 1936- / Marian Faith Healing Ministry / Exorcism / Alternative medicine / Faith healing
Further subjects:B healing narratives faith-healing biomedicine Tanzania Catholicism Marian Faith Healing Ministry
Online Access: Volltext (Verlag)
Description
Summary:The Marian Faith Healing Ministry, under the leadership of the excommunicated Catholic priest Felicien Nkwera, is dedicated to the fight against demons, illness, and corruption. It is a small, but fairly well-known group in Tanzania and enjoys some notoriety due to its propagation of exorcism. At the same time, both the leader and its members fully accept the biomedical paradigm of healing. In this article, I analyze narrative structures reflecting moments of differentiation and de-differentiation between the systems of religious healing and of (bio-)medicine. I draw both on narratives of healing published by Nkwera in his books as well as on narrative interviews conducted with his followers. Religious and biomedical frameworks of explanation were emplotted by some respondents as narratives of miracle healing and conversion, in which biomedicine’s denial of spiritual agency serves as the necessary foil to the efficacy of religious healing. My findings contribute to the study of contemporary forms of alternative medicine by making a case for employing methods of narrative analysis in this field.
ISSN:1568-5276
Contains:In: Numen
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1163/15685276-12341495