Weigel on Lourdes "through the eyes of a sympathetic secular scholar"

In George Weigel's latest column, he mentions what sounds like a very interesting book penned by a scholar sincerely determined to penetrate deeply her subject matter.

....For those interested in examining the phenomenon of Lourdes through the eyes of a sympathetic secular scholar, there is Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (Penguin Books), by the Oxford-based British historian Ruth Harris.

Professor Harris’s scholarship is impeccable, but it’s neither detached nor dessicated: as few secular academics do, she went to Lourdes as a volunteer aide to the sick and found herself caught up in a web of human solidarity, open-mindedness, and “spiritual generosity” (as she puts it in a fine phrase). That experience, coupled with the discovery that modern medicine had no diagnosis (let alone a cure) for a condition then plaguing her, led Ruth Harris to question the modern mythology of scientific progress, according to which phenomena like Lourdes are mindless and reactionary. Breaking with the chief unexamined assumption of secular modernity — that humanity, tutored by the scientific method, will outgrow its “need” for religion — Professor Harris found her scholar’s interest piqued by aspects of the story of Lourdes that skeptics typically miss.

This reminded me that the author of "Song of Bernadette", a book I mean to read some day, was an Austrian Jew. God always seems to get the word out, one way or another.