IN HIS FOOTSTEPS: The Healing Ministry of Jesus--Then and Now

Praise the Lord and pass the psychotherapy--if you didn't get the message in The Gift of Inner Healing and The Experience of Inner Healing, here it is all over again. Stapleton takes ten miraculous cures from the Gospels and writes rambling personal meditations on them, combining, as usual, broadly Evangelical theology and old-fashioned American self-help. This is Seventies style evangelism: conservative but flexible and worldly-wise. Stapleton believes in miracles, and has witnessed, not to say presided over, quite a few herself. But she gives no cheap guarantees (the best story here is about a child who dies of a tropical disease--despite Stapleton's prayers), and she emphasizes the continuity between spiritual healing and psychic well-being: for ""Sister Ruth"" faith doesn't operate in a pious vacuum. As a writer, Stapleton has some virtues--clarity, color, urgency. The whole thing is a perfectly respectable product, except that it's too much of a product: too smooth, too predictable, too tailor-made for a mass market. Stapleton's sincerity and intelligence are real, but she sounds like a religious politician, telling the majority what they want to hear.