Time magazine- time will tell

In the year of my birth Time magazine asks "is god dead?"- now in 2009 they ask "how faith can heal"

a shame it takes being close to being in a foxhole or looking for your daily bread in order for FAITH to take hold-but then again- all was and is meant to be. Here comes the messenger;)

"God Is Dead" Controversy

A popular debate over whether "God is dead" was occasioned by the so-called radical theology propounded in the 1960s by such theologians as William Hamilton, Gabriel Vahanian, and Paul van Buren.

Time Magazine Cover

The best known of these proponents was Thomas J. J. Altizer, then a professor of religion at Emory University in Atlanta. The controversy reflected many of the broader cultural and political changes in American society often associated with that decade. "We must realize that the death of God is an historical event, that God has died in our cosmos, in our history, in our [existence]," Altizer claimed. His frequently provocative manner of speaking, which masked a more complex discussion taking place among academic theologians, for a brief time made him a minor celebrity in the popular media.

Although the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had asserted the "death of God" nearly a century earlier and a theological movement had already adopted the phrase to express the perceived incompatibility between a modern worldview and belief in a transcendent deity, the controversy did not fully erupt until 1965. For a decade before this, Altizer wrote, he "had been torn between an interior certainty of the death of God in modern history ... and a largely mute but nevertheless unshakable conviction of the truth of the Christian faith."

That others considered these two propositions to be irreconcilable became apparent when Time magazine published two articles on radical theology, the first appearing in October 1965.

Thomas J. J. Altizer

The second was the cover story for the April 8, 1966, Easter issue, which asked, "Is God Dead?" in large red letters against a plain black background. A flood of correspondence—most of it denouncing Altizer—filled the editorial pages of local and national newspapers, while outraged clergy and alumni threatened to withhold donations from Emory. The College of Bishops of the Southeastern Jurisdiction of the Methodist Church issued a statement critical of his views but did not formally call for his resignation. Sanford Atwood, president of the Methodist-affiliated university, defended Altizer's tenure in the name of academic freedom, noting also that his appointment was in the undergraduate department of religion and not in the Candler School of Theology, which was responsible for training ministers.

For many observers the controversy and its resolution marked a turning point for Emory, from its previous position as an obscure, southern church school to its present status as a prestigious research university. Altizer left the school in 1968, and the "death of God" movement lost much of its steam by the end of the decade, but Emory continued to maintain a reputation, especially in the South, for theological liberalism.

Suggested Reading

Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966).

The Biology of Belief

By JEFFREY KLUGER Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009

Illustration by Christian Northeast for TIME

Most folks probably couldn't locate their parietal lobe with a map and a compass. For the record, it's at the top of your head — aft of the frontal lobe, fore of the occipital lobe, north of the temporal lobe. What makes the parietal lobe special is not where it lives but what it does — particularly concerning matters of faith.

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If you've ever prayed so hard that you've lost all sense of a larger world outside yourself, that's your parietal lobe at work. If you've ever meditated so deeply that you'd swear the very boundaries of your body had dissolved, that's your parietal too. There are other regions responsible for making your brain the spiritual amusement park it can be: your thalamus plays a role, as do your frontal lobes. But it's your parietal lobe — a central mass of tissue that processes sensory input — that may have the most transporting effect. (Read "Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs".)

Needy creatures that we are, we put the brain's spiritual centers to use all the time. We pray for peace; we meditate for serenity; we chant for wealth. We travel to Lourdes in search of a miracle; we go to Mecca to show our devotion; we eat hallucinogenic mushrooms to attain transcendent vision and gather in church basements to achieve its sober opposite. But there is nothing we pray — or chant or meditate — for more than health.

Health, by definition, is the sine qua non of everything else. If you're dead, serenity is academic. So we convince ourselves that while our medicine is strong and our doctors are wise, our prayers may heal us too.

Here's what's surprising: a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health. People who attend religious services do have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who don't attend. People who believe in a loving God fare better after a diagnosis of illness than people who believe in a punitive God. No less a killer than AIDS will back off at least a bit when it's hit with a double-barreled blast of belief. "Even accounting for medications," says Dr. Gail Ironson, a professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Miami who studies HIV and religious belief, "spirituality predicts for better disease control." (Read "Finding God on YouTube.")

It's hard not to be impressed by findings like that, but a skeptic will say there's nothing remarkable — much less spiritual — about them. You live longer if you go to church because you're there for the cholesterol-screening drive and the visiting-nurse service. Your viral load goes down when you include spirituality in your fight against HIV because your levels of cortisol — a stress hormone — go down first. "Science doesn't deal in supernatural explanations," says Richard Sloan, professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and author of Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine. "Religion and science address different concerns."

That's undeniably true — up to a point. But it's also true that our brains and bodies contain an awful lot of spiritual wiring. Even if there's a scientific explanation for every strand of it, that doesn't mean we can't put it to powerful use. And if one of those uses can make us well, shouldn't we take advantage of it? "A large body of science shows a positive impact of religion on health," says Dr. Andrew Newberg, a professor of radiology, psychology and religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania and co-founder of Penn's Center for Spirituality and the Mind. "The way the brain works is so compatible with religion and spirituality that we're going to be enmeshed in both for a long time."

It's All in Your Head
"enmeshed in the brain" is as good a way as any to describe Newberg's work of the past 15 years. The author of four books, including the soon-to-be-released How God Changes Your Brain, he has looked more closely than most at how our spiritual data-processing center works, conducting various types of brain scans on more than 100 people, all of them in different kinds of worshipful or contemplative states. Over time, Newberg and his team have come to recognize just which parts of the brain light up during just which experiences.

When people engage in prayer, it's the frontal lobes that take the lead, since they govern focus and concentration. During very deep prayer, the parietal lobe powers down, which is what allows us to experience that sense of having loosed our earthly moorings. The frontal lobes go quieter when worshippers are involved in the singular activity of speaking in tongues — which jibes nicely with the speakers' subjective experience that they are not in control of what they're saying.