Search

The Marian Faith Healing Ministry (MFHM) is a group which practices religious healing with holy water under the leadership of Felicien Nkwera. In this paper (based on an empirical study), I argue that through the analysis of the process of appropriation under the perspective of religious aesthetics a highly differentiated view on individual variations and thus on the dynamics of the healing process and the efficacy of religious healing becomes possible. Nkwera is a suspended Catholic priest who performs exorcism and who claims to have been chosen by the Virgin Mary for this task. He provides strict normative guidelines for everybody who wants to be healed at the MFHM. Though most of his followers reproduced these norms rhetorically, the stories about their own healing experiences showed that they placed their own interpretative emphases in different places and sometimes came to opposing conclusions on matters of worldview and practice. Individual practices and interpretations among the members of the MFHM are dependent on factors such as the bodily experience of healing and praying or the dynamics within family networks. The aesthetics of religion approach thereby provides the framework for analysing media of transmission as well as individual processes of perception, embodiment, healing performance and efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]