The system in which you invest yourself is the system in which you believe or in which you come to believe.

Because investing into a system of thought, or paradigm, challenges an identity and forms a future identity, some personal narrative could be beneficial. My father is a somewhat of a holistic dentist in the suburbs of Atlanta whose free-thinking mind and spirit has been one of his greatest gifts. I grew up on a ten-acre lake with 16 acres of woods and pasture land with cows along with a vegetable garden. My parent’s house, built on the cusp of the energy crisis in 1980, had passive solar heat and light. My mom made clothes and fresh-milled bread for our family. Daily wholesome nutrition and supplements were also important items in our household.

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It’s perhaps best to talk about parallel theology as parallel spirituality. This mild distinction is perhaps necessary because “parallel theology,” in some people’s minds, often gets relegated to comparative religions about how some cultures have similar creation stories or flood stories or sacrifices or pantheistic deities or One Deity. This kind of information can be helpful, but there may be something more applicable to us in the parallel spirituality field, particularly in regards to healing.  For example, spiritual parallels in the healing field include that the fact that “life force,” pranayama, and ki all denote very similar energies while their names come from separate cultures or philosophical traditions. This almost universally-known primal energy empowers many healing arts, martial arts, and spiritual practices across the traditions.  (It is interesting to note that modern medical science and biology overlooks this simple and powerful primal life force).

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“The Holistic Way:
John Wesley’s Practical Piety as a Resource for Integrated Healthcare”

ABSTRACT:  In the midst of the multifarious healthcare of the 21st century an Anglican clergyman from the 18th century named John Wesley can serve as a valuable resource for contemporary Christians seeking to faithfully live a life of well-being which incorporates different forms of medicine.  In order to explore Wesley’s contributions to integrative care this essay will first situate Wesley in his eighteenth century context—a time period not completely unlike our own in which medicine was also experiencing dramatic shifts in practice and philosophy.  In order to demonstrate his integration of the medical knowledge of his day the essay will look at Wesley’s own medical practices and his relationships to physicians as forging a ‘middle way’ between physic and empiricism.  The essay will examine Wesley’s theology as a practical piety which is grounded in a holistic sotieriology that sustains an integrative medicine (caring for body, mind, and spirit).   Finally, the essay concludes with possibilities for integrated medicine in our own day as informed by a Wesleyan ‘way’ of holistic practice.

KEY WORDS:  John Wesley, integrated medicine, holism, medical philosophy, practical piety

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