Medicine offers a rich arena in which to take stock of the current state of relations between science, religion and human experience in the modern era. On the one hand, this branch of practical science has functioned over the past century as a highly successful secularizing force in our society. From antibiotics to surgery, its products have functioned as an apparent great walking advertisement for the practical benefits of scientific epistemologies and methods. At the same time, illness and healing remain imperfectly secularized experiences in our culture; ill people continue to be tempted by the promises and consolations of religion; and the secular culture of medicine itself is not rarely identified as a spiritually corrosive force in an ill person's life. In recent years, medicine seems to have signalled a partial recognition of the limitations of its perspectives and practices by taking an interest in such traditionally religious experiences as faith, community, meditation, and prayer. Religion has been welcomed as a potential ally in the healing process. But what kind of alliance is this? We live today in a strange world in which medical researchers design double-blind trials of prayer, ministers talk about the brain and the immune system from the pulpit, monks meditate inside brain imaging machines, and studies of "the placebo effect" and "positive attitude" frame discussions about the "science" of "miracle" healings. The goal of this talk is to illuminate how this strange world came to be, how it is acting to create new conceptions of the secular and the spiritual in the modern world; and what larger lessons might be found here for our efforts to think rigorously about what we want when we imagine science and religion developing constructive alliances in the service of human experience.