Abstract
Granted, there is no monolithic entity defined or manifested as “the Christian church” or even “the US Christian church” with consistent practices and unified beliefs. However, the various groups representing the Christian church share a long and complicated history of compassion and care for those living with disease/illness. This is in part because of the varying ways of interpreting suffering or pain within Christian traditions.
At the best of times most people are reliably and often endearingly contradictory.1
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Notes
Simon Watney, Practices of Freedom: Selected Writings on HIV/AIDS (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), xxii.
Darrel W. Amundsen and Gary B. Ferngren, “Medicine and Religion: Pre-Christian Antiquity” in Health/Medicine and the Faith Traditions, ed. Martin E. Marty and Kenneth L. Vaux (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1982), 62.
Darrel Amundsen and Gary Ferngren, “Medicine and Religion: Early Christianity Through the Middle Ages” in Health/Medicine and the Faith Traditions, ed. Martin E. Marty and Kenneth L. Vaux (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1982), 94.
Ronald L. Numbers and Ronald C. Sawyer, “Medicine and Christianity in the Modern World” in Health/Medicine and the Faith Traditions, ed. Martin E. Marty and Kenneth L. Vaux (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1982), 135.
Greg Behrman, The Invisible People: How the U.S. Has Slept Through the Global AIDS Pandemic, the Greatest Humanitarian Catastrophe of Our Time (New York: Free Press, 2004), 17.
Paula A. Treichler, “AIDS, Gender, and Biomedical Discourse: Current Contests for Meaning” in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox (Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1988), 202.
James Woodward, “Introduction” in Embracing the Chaos: Theological Responses to AIDS, ed. James Woodward (London: SPCK, 1990), 1.
Stephen Pattison, “To the Churches with Love from the Lighthouse” in Embracing the Chaos: Theological Responses to AIDS, ed. James Woodward (London: SPCK, 1990), 12.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “A Time to Break Silence” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1986), 241.
Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 113.
For more on the influence of the King James Bible, see Alister McGrath, In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (New York: Doubleday, 2001).
Tony Barnett and Alan Whiteside, AIDS in the Twenty-First Century: Disease and Globalization, 2nd edition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 375.
Thomas Parran quoted in Elizabeth Fee, “Sin Versus Science: Venereal Disease in Twentieth-Century Baltimore” in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 129. Emphasis Parran’s.
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© 2012 Cassie J. E. H. Trentaz
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Trentaz, C.R.E.H. (2012). Reluctance to Risk: The Story of the US Christian Church. In: Theology in the Age of Global AIDS & HIV. Palgrave Macmillan’s Content and Context in Theological Ethics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137272904_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137272904_4
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