This is thinking in public, a program dedicated to intelligent conversation about

front-line theological and cultural issues with the people who are shaping them.

I'm Albert Molar, your host and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

in Louisville, Kentucky.

Candying Arthur Brown is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University. There she teaches and writes on the topics of religion. of and Pentecostal Christianity. She has published and edited numerous books

and more than 50 journal articles, book chapters,

and review essays.

She earned her baccalaureate, master's,

and PhD degrees at Harvard University.

Her latest work is The Healing Gods,

Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America.

It's published by Oxford University Press. In her book, she writes of what she

calls quote, the intriguing and sometimes astonishing story

of the mainstreaming of complementary and alternative medicine

in America, and she writes with specificity

of Christian America. I'm really looking forward to this conversation

with Professor Candy Gunther Brown. Professor Brown I think there will be many

people who actually aren't familiar with the term complementary and

alternative medicine.

But that's been the focus of one of your concerns and you came to it by an interesting route

as you tell about in the book and in its introduction.

How did you come as an historian to look at the intersection of Christianity

...