The alternative, then, is pastoral care, which church intellectuals define as listening to the deepest yearnings of believers and challenging them with the teachings of the Gospel.
As manager of more than 600 of the country's hospitals and more than a thousand elder and long-term care facilities, church doctrine controls the care patients receive.
She started abandoning her daughter and her son, Gary, to the care of church followers for months at a time, strangers who brought to bear a spectrum of abuses.
Country music remains soul's guilty secret, though as this second compilation of crossover cuts confirms, the artists themselves love its narrative style, whether it's Lou Johnson taking "She Thinks I Still Care" to church or Joe Tex proclaiming himself "King Of The Road".
Mr. Davis said that by toning down "the judgmental part of our nature" and opening the doors to people seeking Christian Science prayer as a sort of "value-added health care," the church hopes to keep alive a form of religious practice that its adherents still see as the true path to salvation.
He died Tuesday at a Los Angeles retirement center where he had been receiving hospice care, a church spokesman said.
"This was when nobody cared about Church's paintings and the tags were on them, to go to Sotheby's".
Jason Young, a spokesman for Ms. Sebelius, said she had made fund-raising calls to advocates for patients, health care providers, churches and other outside groups.
But at this time of year, staff members spend hours scurrying to day care centers, churches and apartment complexes to find prospective parents, said Katie Smith, the assistant principal.
Some unfold in public school classrooms, others in storefront day care centers, churches or Y.M.C.A.'s, and still others in tiny centers run out of private homes.
