Hallelujah diets. Body by God. Karate for Christ. Gospel groove workouts.

Using the Lord's name (not in vain), fitness and diet enthusiasts are injecting the Almighty into nutrition programs, exercise DVDs, martial arts and healthy living courses. 

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When television's Dr. Mehmet Oz promoted Reiki as the top alternative medicine secret in 2010, the energy-based healing therapy took a giant leap forward in America's alternative and complementary medicine arsenal.

Reiki (pronounced RAY-kee) is a gentle, hands-on healing practice developed in Japan by Mikao Usui in 1914. It is based on the idea that every person possesses an energy source or life force that supports the body's ability to heal itself. A Reiki practitioner can help guide that person toward finding that energy and being in balance, enabling the body to heal. Read the rest of this article

Health and religion have always been intertwined, most obviously through prayer on behalf of the sick. Does intercessory prayer for sick people actually help heal them? For thousands of years some people have believed so. But new Brandeis University research in the June 2009 Journal of Religion shows that over the last four decades, medical studies of intercessory prayer — the prayer of strangers at a distance — actually say more about the scientists conducting the studies than about the power of prayer to heal.

Intercessory prayer has been the subject of scientific study since at least the nineteenth century, when an English scientist, assuming that kings were prayed for more often than others, sought to find out whether those prayers were answered. He concluded that they were not, but that prayer might be a comfort to the people praying anyway.
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