Religious and Alternative Healing in the Modern World

The project aims to explore and discuss critically contemporary avenues of healing practices within the alternative, spiritual and/or religious domains of Western society. It questions if alternative or religious healing practices are to be seen as expressions of backwardness, ignorance or gullibility, or are they actually more an example of the subjectified self-dependence of people in modernity and the development of the individual as consumer in all aspects of 21st century life? To what extent does this development relate to 'secularization', or better 'unchurchisation', or indeed to a lack of trust in science and materialism alone?