Social Science Research Council
Pamela E. Klassen is Associate Professor in the Department and Centre for the Study of Religion and the Director of the Religion in the Public Sphere Initiative (www.chass.utoronto.ca/rps) at the University of Toronto. Her publications include "Radio Mind: Christian Experimentalists on the Frontiers of Healing" (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, September 2007) and Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America (Princeton University Press, 2001). She is currently at work on a book about liberal Protestants and healing, in which proof and the paranormal play a prominent role. This book, Healing Christians: Religion, Medicine, and Anxieties of Difference, will be forthcoming from University of California Press.
By some sort of happy coincidence—or to use the surrealist term referenced by Jeremy Biles, “objective chance”—I watched Youth Without Youth the same day that I viewed another movie about the “facts” of enchantment as they appeared in the twentieth century, Fairy Tale: A True Story (1997). Though doing so with admittedly different artistic aspirations and audiences, both movies allude to historical characters and controversies in the study of religion.
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