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Miracle Cures

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Endorsement for Miracle Cures: Saints, Pilgrimage, and The Healing Powers of Belief
By Robert A. Scott

Lourdes grotto

The book seamlessly weaves together religious pilgrimages, mind-body connections, and healing.  Scott charts the interface of individual and social life in medieval to modern times, the role that pilgrimages played, and how individual life and religion gained from each other.  Rather than pit science against religion, Scott sensitively underscores the point of connection where their fingers touch—a written version of what one sees in the Creation of Adam.  Scott provides fascinating accounts of maladies and cures, novel ways to explain them, and the interplay of medicine and religion.  Health and well being, belief, social support, stress, and hope are universal themes and the appeal of this book is universal as well.  Scott is a well recognized scholar and this book easily conveys how well deserved is this status.  Beyond that the book reveals his special talent of integrating what we know with what we believe and how they both play pivotal roles in our everyday lives. 

Alan E. Kazdin, Ph.D.
Yale University
John M. Musser Professor of Psychology & Child Psychiatry
Past-President, American Psychological Association