Can Christianity Cure Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?: A Psychiatrist Explores the Role of Faith in Treatment
Author: Ian Osborn MD
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a relentless condition, the primary symptom being the occurrence of terrifying ideas, images, and urges that jump into a person's mind and return again and again, despite the individual's attempt to remove them.
Christians who suffer from OCD may grapple with additional guilt, as the undesired thoughts are frequently of a spiritual nature. Yet people may be surprised to learn that some of the greatest leaders in Christian history also struggled with this malady. What did they experience? How did they cope? Were they able to overcome these tormenting, often violent, obsessions? Where did God fit into the picture?
Ian Osborn shares the personal accounts of Martin Luther, John Bunyan, and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, as well as his own story, in exploring how faith and science work together to address this complex issue.
Book review: Lights out or Healing Love through the Tao
The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History
Author: Katherine Ashenburg
The question of cleanliness is one every age and culture has answered with confidence. For the first-century Roman, being clean meant a two-hour soak in baths of various temperatures, scraping the body with a miniature rake, and a final application of oil. For the aristocratic Frenchman in the seventeenth century, it meant changing your shirt once a day and perhaps going so far as to dip your hands in some water. Did Napoleon know something we didn’t when he wrote Josephine “I will return in five days. Stop washing”? And why is the German term Warmduscher—a man who washes in warm or hot water—invariably a slight against his masculinity? Katherine Ashenburg takes on such fascinating questions as these in Clean, her charming tour of attitudes to hygiene through time.
What could be more routine than taking up soap and water and washing yourself? And yet cleanliness, or the lack of it, is intimately connected to ideas as large as spirituality and sexuality, and historical events that include plagues, the Civil War, and the discovery of germs. An engrossing fusion of erudition and anecdote, Clean considers the bizarre prescriptions of history’sdoctors, the hygienic peccadilloes of great authors, and the historic twists and turns that have brought us to a place Ashenburg considers hedonistic yet oversanitized.
Publishers Weekly
According to Ashenburg (The Mourner's Dance), the Western notion of cleanliness is a complex cultural creation that is constantly evolving, from Homer's well-washed Odysseus, who bathes before and after each of his colorful journeys, to Shaw's Eliza Doolittle, who screams in terror during her first hot bath. The ancient Romans considered cleanliness a social virtue, and Jews practiced ritual purity laws involving immersion in water. Abandoning Jewish practice, early Christians viewed bathing as a form of hedonism; they embraced saints like Godric, who, to mortify the flesh, walked from England to Jerusalem without washing or changing his clothes. Yet the Crusaders imported communal Turkish baths to medieval Europe. From the 14th to 18th centuries, kings and peasants shunned water because they thought it spread bubonic plague, and Louis XIV cleaned up by donning a fresh linen shirt. Americans, writes Ashenburg, were as filthy as their European cousins before the Civil War, but the Union's success in controlling disease through hygiene convinced its citizens that cleanliness was progressive and patriotic. Brimming with lively anecdotes, this well-researched, smartly paced and endearing history of Western cleanliness holds a welcome mirror up to our intimate selves, revealing deep-seated desires and fears spanning 2000-plus years. 82 b&w illus. (Nov. 15)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationScott H. Silverman - Library Journal
Freelancer Ashenburg is drawn to mining universal cultural experiences, although her previous book, The Mourner's Dance: What We Do When People Die, had more sober subject matter than this irony-laden, "greatest hits" sampling of Western hygienic history. The Greeks bathed for their gods, contemporary Americans are wallowing in long showers. In between these temporal poles a lot of filth accumulated, providing fertile base for endemic lice. Indeed, the appalling sanitary conditions of medieval Europe-persisting into the 19th century-made each individual a fine host for the Plague-bearing fleas that jumped from rodent to human. Ashenburg piles one delightful (delight in the grotty being a taste decidedly more for some than others) anecdote upon another. It turns out, for instance, that Louis XIV may have been the Sun King but not because he exposed his skin to air (or water). A final strength of this not particularly analytical history is the concluding chapters' demonstration of the triumphant intersection of technology (e.g. Procter & Gamble's serendipitous discovery of how to mass-produce bar soap) and the rise of the advertising industry and its key distribution vehicle, the middle-class-aimed illustrated journals. Recommended.
School Library Journal
Adult/High School- This is a fascinating examination of the changing notions of what it means to be clean, and how those concepts fit into the worldview of different societies. The book is especially valuable for exploring the daily lives of people in past societies, but also for providing perspective on our attitudes toward ourselves, our bodies, and our world. It begins with the communal baths of the Greeks and Romans and explores the religious and ritual aspects of bathing, including Christian baptism. The public bath returned with the Crusaders, who brought the custom back to Europe in the form of the Turkish bath. With the plague and fears of communicable diseases, people avoided water-which they feared made the body vulnerable-in favor of linen cloth, which could be changed regularly, in lieu of bathing. Fear of immersing the body in water continued into the 20th century. Ashenburg, who uses interesting quotes from contemporaries to illustrate her history, speculates that in the future, when water shortages dictate new concepts of cleanliness, our own day may be seen as an age of excessive bathing and deodorizing.-Tom Holmes, King Middle School, Berkeley, CA
Kirkus Reviews
Cleanliness has a surprising history. The morning routines of Americans generally include a shower, but people in other times and places have thought differently about what constitutes an appropriately clean body, writes Ashenburg (The Mourner's Dance, 2003, etc.). Many cultures find body odor sexy; the choicest illustration appears in a letter from Napoleon, who wrote to Josephine, "I will return to Paris in five days. Stop washing." Beginning with the social significance of the public bath in ancient Greece, the author moves on to consider early Christian ascetics' disdain for cleanliness ("dirtiness became a uniquely Christian badge of holiness") and the appearance of instructions about face-washing in medieval etiquette guides. During the 19th century, the burgeoning American middle class got serious about keeping bodies and houses clean, and cleanliness was imputed with a new moral value; people could judge another's worthiness by the glow of their skin and the shine of their hair. In clear and straightforward prose, Ashenburg condenses a vast amount of information into smooth chapters that are free of padding. She includes many quirky tidbits of cultural history, such as the role played by bathing in Eliza Doolittle's transformation from Cockney flower-seller to fair lady and the appearance in the 1930s of vaguely menacing magazine ads that threatened women with spinsterhood if they dared let their breath or armpits smell. She closes on a disturbing note, pointing out that Americans have developed the standards of cleanliness they enjoy today at least in part because modern irrigation and rainfall levels made it possible for millions of people to shower regularly. If the globalclimate changes, our current habits may strike our 22nd-century descendants as odd, if not shocking. Dozens of charming illustrations distinguish a book notable for its engaging design as well as its illuminating content.
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