Faith-Healing Ministry in Africa: A Catholic Bio-Social Ethics

The present book engages three fields; namely, African traditional religion (ATR), Catholic religion and biomedical sciences in their endeavor to sustain health and well-being. It proceeds from the conviction that faith-healing is an essential element of theological bioethics. The discipline of theological bioethics reflects on the questions that arise in medicine and treatment of illness, and issues related to human biology, decisions to be made in case of this or that pain or disease, including the discernment on the normal and paranormal phenomena that could affect people of faith. The search for spiritual powers, as they are related to the not-yet-born, to the living, and to the dead is a crucial question to Catholic bioethics and pastoral ministry. This work considers that complex issue without pretending to offer a definitive answer. It relies on Catholic bioethics as a multi-disciplinary approach illumined by faith to propose some criteria for making a discernment regarding powers of spiritual healing which are claimed in today's Christian Sub-Saharan Africa.