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From Pat Deveney's database:
Churches' Fellowship for Psychical Studies, The.
Quarterly Review.
To Faith Add Knowledge
Other titles: Quarterly Review of The Churches' Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies
1954
Louth, then London, England. Language: English.
Editor: Reginald M. Lester, C.J.I./F.J.I..
1/1, December 1954 - current(?). (No. 31 is March 1962). 36-16 pp., £13.00 a year (joint husband and wife £19.00; Pensioners, Students, Clergy, Ministers and their spouses £9.00). The Churches' Fellowship for Psychical Study, which became the Churches' Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies, for which this was the journal, was founded in 1953 by Lt.-Col. Reginald M. Lester, F.J.I. and a group of clergy and laymen interested in parapsychology, Christianity and, increasingly, spirituality and mysticism generally, as a means strengthening religious belief in an afterlife.
"Our studies include healing ministry, religious experience, paranormal phenomena, mysticism and prayer to name but a few. We aim to help those who may have encountered an event which was outside their understanding or who may have received a 'gift of the Spirit' but found little encouragement or support when seeking a way forward. Many people have come to value the guidance of the Fellowship when they have experienced spontaneous gifts of the Spirit, the pain of bereavement or simply a call to deeper spiritual understanding. The Fellowship offers a safe meeting place where members and enquirers may share and explore these experiences, in an open atmosphere of love and acceptance."
As psychical research took a more secondary position in the fellowship over time a companion journal, The Christian Parapsychologist, was started to address those issues particularly. This journal included among its members and patrons an impressive number of the higher Episcopal clergy, reflecting a significant change from the Church's early opposition to psychical research. The journal largely consisted of reports of the activities of the fellowship, obituaries, and reviews of current literature of interest to members.
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| Claude-Generated Themes:
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The Churches' Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies was a British, largely Anglican body that brought the tools of psychical research inside the Church, publishing The Christian Parapsychologist alongside its Quarterly Review. Its concern is the same as the Society for Psychical Research — mediumship, clairvoyance, and above all the survival of death — but its frame is Christian orthodoxy, with Bible study on the same meeting calendar and scriptural caution about the revelations it weighs. Survival of bodily death is the animating question; spiritual and church healing, 'here and hereafter,' is a standing programme; even reincarnation is entertained as a subject of study rather than a creed. It is not a spiritualist church but a fellowship of churchmen testing the evidence for life beyond death. For the taxonomy it reads as Christian psychical research, shading into survival, cautious spiritualism, and spiritual healing.
Generated by Claude from the periodical's digitized text; a thematic reading, not a bibliographic description.
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