Response to AAR Articles

These articles were first presented in the form of a panel to the Wesleyan Studies Unit of the American Academy of Religion. At the time, Randy Maddox commented that it would be difficult to respond to such a diverse set of papers. Interestingly, their common inspiration, which had prompted the call for papers, had been the 2018 volume he edited with James G. Donat (Medical and Health Writings, vol. XXXII of The Works of John Wesley). At the heart of this volume is Wesley's Primitive Physic, which originated with A Collection of Receipts for the Use of the Poor in 1745, a text also included in the volume. In 1747, it became Primitive Physic after Wesley's addition of an exercise regimen; it would later undergo a number of serious revisions (at least twenty times!) over the course of the rest of his life. As diverse as our panel's papers were, I have found that the primary sources and introductory material in Medical and Health Writings provided a lens centred on healing and health that made it possible for me to see parallels as I responded to each article in turn. Throughout this response, I will consider their individual revised forms before identifying common points for further exploration.In his article ‘“Houses of Mercy”: Healthcare Initiatives of the Woman's Home Missionary Society in Alaska’, Alex Parrish exposes racist and possibly eugenic underpinnings of the Society's expressed evangelistic concern for and actions to promote the physical health of Alaska Natives over several decades. It is clearly impossible to present such a historical narrative without offering critical analysis based on contemporary understandings, and in this case we surely have to face the shadow side of some of Methodism's brightest intentions, and especially the ‘problem of Native-ness’ approach to mission-as-Americanization, as Parrish has described it in his previous article, ‘“Educator and Civilizer”: The Woman's Home Missionary Society’.1It is helpful that Parrish identifies some of the predecessors of the Woman's Home Missionary Society (WHMS). The prejudice evident in such action and language was echoed in the way the WHMS reported on later groups; for example, the manner in which they recorded the number of children surviving tuberculosis according to their races. Presbyterian minister, missionary, and government-appointed general agent of education, Revd Sheldon, also clearly manipulated the Society's understandings by demonizing Native persons and exalting white racial hegemony. What remains unclear is whether there exists any record of a specific Wesleyan foundation to the Society's approach. Particularly in light of the original panel's theme, inspired by John Wesley's popular medical and health writings, it would be interesting to know whether the Society had any awareness of the purposes and popularity of Wesley's much-revised Primitive Physic. From sources that began as equipment for local preachers to care for their hearers' well-being, Wesley eventually sought to place the power of bodily wellness in the hands of the sick themselves at reasonable cost and using Native resources such as herbs.2 Thus, I wonder what the one who sought to restore ‘primitive Christianity’ and tried to dress like the Natives himself would think about the erasure of Native culture. Had self-awareness and trust in a community's ability to advance its own well-being become casualties of the fact that Primitive Physic had gone out of vogue, even in England, within half a century of Wesley's death?Sangwoo Kim's work on twentieth-century Korean Methodist spiritual healer Chun Jin richly weaves together a very specific series of historical and biographical events that call to mind the current issues of war and peace in Korea, and of the global refugee crisis more broadly. I have wondered if Sangwoo had these present crises in mind as he wrote. Working at an institution that is home to a Soul Repair Center for Moral Injury, I am intrigued by the particular forms that illnesses take in the war-torn and wounded persons who were brought to and who ‘flocked’ to Chun for her peculiar form of healing. It is notable that, however criticized to the contrary, the Daehan Sudowon intended to be a ministry alongside rather than instead of the church, just like the healing centres John Wesley set up in the form of clinics in London, Bristol, and Newcastle, the results from which influenced his revision of his Collection of Receipts for the Use of the Poor into Primitive Physic. One wonders whether Chun's explanation of her ‘patting’ practice would be compelling to Wesley. He alternately might have seen it as a unique adaptation of the physical exercises that he prescribed, or might have sided with those who would test it against the ancient witness of the Law and the prophets, and find it wanting.3 It is hard to say.Michael Nausner's ‘Together Whole: A Participatory Understanding of Health from a Wesleyan Perspective’ has evolved sufficiently since its initial presentation that it now includes a greater proportion of the ‘participatory’ than of the ‘Wesleyan’ emphasis, so I shall focus primarily on the latter. Nausner expresses concern over Gorman's emphases on the connection between individuals' health and holiness and on Wesley's regimen and discipline, which Nausner chalks up to Puritan elements of Wesley's heritage. While Gorman may leave the door open for that critique, I see in Nausner's reading of Swinton on depression and dementia an overemphasis on the community that risks diminishment of the individual's role in participation. After all, the administration of ‘physic’ had, in Wesley's England, by the time of George Herbert, become the regular duty of remote parish priests sent to communities to bring prescriptions and regimens to individuals.4 Thus, an individual's participation in a community of faith in eighteenth-century Britain could itself be a means of experiencing physical healing. Wesley continued in Herbert's tradition as he collected understandings of and research on wellness and illness of his day. I do, however, appreciate Nausner's ultimate emphasis on Eucharistic participation that extends healing beyond individual bodies to a larger embodiment. In my own research on Augustine (with John Wesley as a case study) I uncover similar fine points of incorporation in Christ's members for disciples as believers-into-Christ, transforming Eucharistic understanding.5In her article ‘Disabling Hope: Healing Imagery in the Wesleyan Hymn Tradition’, Sarah Sours effectively demonstrates sensitivity to both Charles Wesley in his context by describing the intentions of his own lyrical theology (to borrow S T Kimbrough's phrase) as anything but ableist and to the contemporary need to avoid crooning refrains that cannot help but harm the impaired and/or disabled.6 In making this statement, I work within the particular paradigm of disability studies Sours has selected to offer laypersons to the field a thumbnail sketch of the issues at stake. I am grateful that she raises awareness—as members of the United Methodist Church cherish our acronyms but do not always know what all of them are or stand for (pun intended)—of the DAMC. She helps the reader appreciate the DAMC's plea in the matter of a much beloved and never completely sung hymn. In light of the fact that there are eighteen verses to Charles Wesley's poem, ‘For the Anniversary Day of One's Conversion’, I wonder: Is there a middle way by which we might turn from hymn fifty-seven to the nearly-full printing of hymn fifty-eight in the United Methodist Hymnal and sing verses one to ten and eighteen (the hymnal already skipping verse seventeen's racist overtones)?7 This question is rhetorical, of course, as congregations are likely as reluctant to accommodate so much singing of the same hymn as they are to accommodate—let alone ‘facilitate (and not just accommodate)’—all persons in their building's architecture. Informative as it is for the lay reader, I continue to wonder whether, for those in the disability studies community who reject any negative connotations of either impairment or disability, Alistair McIntyre's take is helpful, concentrating as it does on temporary seasons of impairment and disability. Are there times when glorying in dependence is no more helpful to the disability community than would be the subtitle of Wesley's Primitive Physic: or an Easy and Natural Method of Curing Most Diseases?Questions that arise from common threads in these articles are: There are echoes of (and contrasts with) the way that Wesley worked to put healing in the hands of laypersons to counteract growing costs associated with a rising profession of medicine throughout these articles. What may still be heard as lessons for confronting the present healthcare crisis in the United States and worldwide?The varieties of fields within Wesley and Methodist studies is evident in these articles, including historians, ethicists, and theologians. Two clear questions emerge for me from the distinct disciplines here represented for Wesleyan influence in the wider world.a.In light of our theological and ethical emphases here on more than mere accommodation of disability, what has the Wesleys' method to offer the church and world along these lines? If in fact Wesley's strict self-discipline, which Gorman identifies as intended to help readers keep from damaging themselves in a society not always interested in their well-being, is, as Nausner reads it, dangerous and merely puritanical in its origin, can there be any inspiration in it for congregations not only to accommodate but actively to facilitate flourishing, as Sours suggests? What lessons may yet exist from the Wesleys for at least Western cultures steeped in excesses that both threaten the health of those who have and marginalize and restrict access to care for those who have not?b.In light of our historians' depictions of Methodist-related ministries of healing for and among marginalized persons suffering from war and colonial occupation generations ago, what healing ministries exist among marginalized and minoritized people among us today? The largest global body of Methodists, the United Methodist Church, faces schism due to disagreements about the very lives of people based not on ethnic minority status but on sexual minority status. Might the same Wesley whose constant reading made him revise his healing methods, including many that now seem at least as controversial as did Chun's ‘patting’, read today's medical findings and consider the UMC's anti-LGBTQIA+ stance as unscientific as old opinions regarding Native predispositions to tuberculosis? How would it affect the global dialogue if Wesley were here to consider the existence of LGBTQIA+ persons a matter of the diversity of creation of bodies in God's image and to call for the healing of harm resulting from exclusion by the application of a poultice of inclusion for the wholeness of the whole creation

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