Conference Schedule

Friday
March 6, 2015

8am-1pm: Registration Open [Lobby]

9am-12pm: Pre-conference Activities 

12pm-1:00pm: Break for Lunch

1pm-1:10pm: Welcome [Ballroom CD]

  • Michael Balboni, PhD, ThM, MDiv
  • Dr. Farr Curlin, MD

1:10pm-2:45pm: An Interdisciplinary Case Discussion on "I was Bleeding for My Sins"  [Ballroom CD]

  • Harold Koenig, MD
  • Rev. Ray Hammond, MD, MA
  • George Handzo, MDiv 
  • Linda Barnes, PhD 
  • Heather Curtis, MA, ThD 

2:45pm-3:00pm: Break

3:00pm-4:15pm: Parallel Sessions

Paper Session: Religion, Spirituality, and Depression [Pitcher]
  • Religious Service Attendance and Depression Among U.S. Women: Assessing Causation and Feedback
  • Effects of Spirituality & Religiosity on Stress, Anxiety, Depression: Moderation, Mediation, or Moderated Mediation?
  • Screening for Depression in African American Churches

Paper Session: Dilemmas of Difference [Saloman]
  • Sallekhana in West Texas: One Jain Woman's Quest to Find Ancient Meaning in a Modern Death
  • Conscientious Refusal to Participate in Evil: The Search for Health and the Care for Souls
  • Integrity of Being: Therapy, Theories, and Truth

Religious Resources for Healing [Aquarium]
  • A Theologian's Story of Spiritual Care: A Patient Encounter and Gabriel Marcel's Authentic Relationship
  • Light over Darkness: The Expression of Emotional Loss and Grief Through Figurative Sculpture
  • Ritual Healing

Panel Session: Perspectives on Religion and its Engagement of Medical Systems: Synthesis, Tensions, Trajectories [Attucks]

Panel Session: Efficacy and Evidence: Questioning Paradigms Across Religious Healing Traditions 
[Dawes]

Panel Session: Can the Spiritual Speak? Towards a Reconfigured Relationship between Spirituality and Medicine 
[Paine]

Panel Session: Spiritually Integrated Mental Health Treatment: What Does Experience Teach Us? 
[Revere A]

Workshop Session: Waiting for a Miracle? [Revere BC]

4:15pm-4:30pm: Break

4:30pm-5:45pm: Parallel Sessions

Paper Session: Modes of Faith in Medicine [Revere A]
  • Alexis Carrel: A Life in Search of the Integration of Medicine, Science, and Faith
  • Trust, Faith, and Transformation in Central Appalachia
  • African Americans Rate "Having God's Help" as the Single Most Important Factor Affecting a Person's Ability to Quit Smoking: Results from a National Survey

Paper Session: Perspectives on Dying Well [Revere BC]
  • Hinduism and Death with Dignity
  • What Can Siddhartha Teach Us About Dying Well?
  • Exploring Clergy Perspectives on a ‘Good Death’ vs ‘Bad Death’ When Ministering to Terminally Ill Congregants

Panel Session: Ethics and Emergence: The Facts of the Case [Attucks]

Panel Session: A Theoretically and Clinically Grounded Model for Spiritual Healing in a Palliative Care Context: Clinical, Ethical, and Theological Perspectives on Harvey Chochinov’s Dignity Therapy [Dawes]

Panel Session: Brain, Mind and Soul: Advances in Clinical and Scientific Approaches to Brain-Mind Health and Spirituality [Paine]

Workshop Session: Healing Through and Through: Integrating Spiritual Care into the Treatment Plan for Sustainable Outcomes [Saloman]

Workshop Session: Development of a Physician Driven Department of Healthcare and Spirituality: At a Large Hospital System [Pitcher]

5:45pm-8:00pm: Shuttles to Restaurants

6:30pm-8:30pm: Shabbat Dinner [Empress]

8:30pm:  A Discussion on Funding the Field of Religion, Spirituality, and Health - Opportunities and Tensions [Empress]

  • Templeton Foundation 
  • Harold Koenig, MD
  • Christina Puchalski, MD, MS
  • Alexandra Shields, PhD         
Saturday
March 7, 2015

7:00am-7:45am: Catholic Mass [Paine] & Protestant Worship* [Attucks]

7am-8am: Registration [Lobby] and Continental Breakfast [Empress]

8:00am-10:15am: Parallel Sessions

Paper Session: Expanding Paradigms of Persons and Healing [Attucks]
  • The Role of Muslim Ontology in Defining a Schema of Causes and Means of Healing
  • Fragments and Boxes: The Brewing War Between Whole-Person Care and Managed Care
  • Person-centered Care Across the Continuum: Attending to the Spirit in Non-Acute Medicine
  • Practicing Patients: Revisiting the Patient as Person
  • The Importance of Lament; A Medical Lesson from the Book of Job

Paper Session: Virtues, Vices, and the Soul [Dawes]
  • Humility as a Psychotherapeutic Virtue: Religious Dynamics, Empirical Findings, and Clinical Implications
  • Sufi Metaphysics and the Virtue of Humility/Modesty in Medical Practice
  • The Vice of Acedia: A Spiritual and Mental Health Issue
  • The Art of Care for Body and Soul: Theology, Wisdom, and Medical Care
  • Parallel Dialogue: Patristic Diagnostics, Postmodern Insight on the Care of the Soul. Implication for Contemporary Doctor-Patient Encounters

Paper Session: Historical Perspectives [Pitcher]
  • Galenism and Early Christianity
  • “A Division of Labor but a Unity of Spirit”: Spiritual Dimensions of Illness and Healing in the Context of the (De)medicalization of Childbirth from the Ancient Greco-Roman World to Today
  • Asclepius at Epidaurus: Religious Space and the Experience of Healing in Ancient Greece
  • From Portent to Pathology: How Medicine has Reshaped the Monstrous Body
  • Touring Clinics and Medical Philanthropy: Missionaries in Colonial South India

Paper Session: Technology, Decisions, and Care [Paine]
  • Surrogate Demands for Life Sustaining Treatment: Can Ethics Consultation Mitigate Patient Suffering and Facilitate Surrogate Bereavement?
  • Miracle Language in the NICU
  • Variants, Verification, and Termination: An LDS Perceptive on the Theological Implications of Non-invasive Prenatal Whole Genome Sequencing
  • Making and Keeping Human Life Human
  • The Loving Care of a Machine: Artificial Intelligence, Illness, and Suffering

Paper Session: Theology and Belief at the End of Life [Saloman]
  • Implications of Karl Barth’s Christology for Physician-Assisted Suicide
  • Asclepius against the Crucified: Medical Nihilism and Incarnational Life in Death
  • Brittany and Maggie: Two Perspectives of Terminal Brain Cancer and Physician-Assisted Death
  • Spirituality and Truth Telling in Indian Palliative Care: Stories of a Complex Relationship
  • White, Black, and Latino Religious Beliefs About End-Of-Life Medical Care: A Preliminary Analysis of the Coping with Cancer 2 Study

Paper Session: The Good Physician [Revere A]
  • Developing the “Good” Physician: Spirituality, Moral Intuitions, and Virtues in Medical Students
  • Religion, Sense of Calling and the Practice of Medicine: Findings from a National Survey of Primary Care Physicians and Psychiatrists
  • Whole Person Care and Moral Formation in Student Physicians
  • Maimonides the Physician: A Model for Our Time?
  • Go and Do Likewise: The Principle of Beneficence and the Virtue of Charity in the Practice of Medicine

Panel Session: Christian Theology and the Nature of Attachment: A Panel on Gregory Fricchione's Compassion and Healing in Medicine and Society: On the Nature and Use of Attachment Solutions to Separation Challenges [Revere BC]

10:15-11:15am: Break & Poster Session [Ballroom AB]

11:15am-12:45pm: Plenary One- In what sense is illness a spiritual and/or religious experience? [Ballroom CD]

  • Margaret Mohrmann, MD, PhD
  • Ahsan Arozullah, MD, MPH
  • Saul Berman, JD

12:45pm-2:15pm: Lunch [Lobby]

2:15pm-3:45pm: Plenary Two- How should particular spiritual and religious needs of patients be addressed and by whom? [Ballroom CD]

  • Margaret Mohrmann, MD, PhD
  • Ahsan Arozullah, MD, MPH
  • Saul Berman, JD

3:45pm-4:00pm: Break

4:00pm-5:15pm: Parallel Sessions

Paper Session: Religious Coping [Attucks]
  • Negative Religious Coping as a Correlate of Suicidal Ideation in Patients with Advanced Cancer
  • Spiritual and Religious Dimensions of Coping among Low-Income Depressed Mothers: A Qualitative Analysis
  • Healing the Healers: Burnout, Spirituality, and Coping Among Physicians and Clergy

Paper Session: Documenting and Measuring Spiritual Care [Aquarium]
  • Chaplain Documentation in the ICU
  • The Assessment and Relevance of a Child’s Spiritual Formation and Religious Identity in the Diagnosis and Management of Mental Illness
  • Clinical Applications of the Meaning Systems Interview

Panel Session: Recovering Transcendence in Medicine: Do We Need Mindfulness, Spirituality or Religion? [Dawes]

Panel Session: Spiritual Death According to Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism: What Can Modern Medicine and Western Culture Learn? [Pitcher]

Panel Session: Health Risk Assessment: Examining the Similarities between the Reasoning Exercises of Medical Experts and Islamic Legists [Paine]

Panel Session: Healing Health Care: Moving the Sacramental Tradition from the Edges to the Center of Catholic Health Care [Saloman]

Panel Session: In Memory of Grace: The Spiritual & Religious Tale of a Patient, Her Sister, a Mentor and Her Student [Revere A]

Workshop Session: Spiritual Resistance and Medical Care During the Holocaust: The Role of Rabbinic Responsa [Revere BC]

5:15pm-6:15pm: Break

6:15pm-8:45pm: Dinner and Keynote Lecture- Cares, Taking Care and Caregiving: The Vital Nexus between Religion and Medicine [Ballroom CD]

Arthur Kleinman, MD, MA

8:45pm: City-View Discussion [Empress]

  • Entertainment by Hanneke Cassel 
  • Harvard Initiative on Health, Religion, and Spirituality
  • Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative, Duke Divinity School
  • Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics, Saint Louis University
Sunday
March 8, 2015

7:00am-7:45am: Catholic Mass [Paine] & Protestant Worship* [Attucks]

7am-8am: Continental Breakfast

8am-9:40am: Parallel Sessions

Paper Session: Soul and Self [Dawes]
  • Spirituality and the Moral Self
  • Practices of the Self in Medicine
  • A New Model of the Relationship between Religion, Self-Regulation, and Mental Well-Being
  • Neural Evidence for the Role of Religion in Self-Control: Is It Really a Matter of Strength?

Paper Session: Prayer and Healing [Pitcher]
  • Prayer Mountain: A Place of Physical and Spiritual Healing through Prayer
  • What Are We Praying for When We Pray for Healing? Torah Perspectives
  • May one pray for a patient to die while working to extend life? Navigating the inherent tension in Jewish tradition between compassion for patient suffering and the custodial obligation to protect and extend life
  • Hope, Healing, and Jewish Prayer

Paper Session: Health Care in Religious Contexts [Saloman]
  • Ramadan and Health: A Mini Review
  • A Matter of Life and Death: Religious Bridges and Barriers to Jewish Organ Donation
  • Seeing Jesus as a Jew: Medicine and Pluralism Beyond the Bounds of “Tolerance” 
  • “My Mercy Embraces All Things”: Comparative Notions of Mercy in Muslim and Catholic Bioethical Responses to HIV and AIDS in Kenya

Paper Session: Visions of Human Health [Revere A]
  • Healing Body and Soul In the Jewish Tradition- The Role of the Physician
  • A Process Approach to Medicine in a Post-Modern World
  • Health and the Human Good
  • Illness, Healing and Spiritual Practices: Theological Perspectives & Ethical Priorities

Paper Session: Models of Caregiving [Aquarium]
  • Bikkur Cholim: Sacred Visits as a Mitzvah of Relationship
  • Servants of All: David Hilfiker, Paul Farmer, and the Physician as Servant
  • “I Was Sick, and You Took Care of Me”: Caring for the Sick as a "Spiritual" Discipline and an Act of Economic and Ecological Justice
  • The Priestly Character of Medicine: John Zizioulas’s Eucharistic Vision in the Clinical Context, with Reference to Eric Cassell

Paper Session: Spirituality and the Doctor-Patient Relationship [Revere BC]
  • The Human Cost of Competition: How Do Patients Suffer When Rivalry Trumps Humility? Suggestions from Two Case Studies in Experimental Hand Transplantation
  • 30-Year Experience of Introducing Spirituality in Medical Practice
  • Asymmetric Spiritual Gains in the Physician-Patient Relationship: An Islamic Perspective
  • Not Empathy, but Thou Shalt Not Kill: Buber and Levinas in Dialogue, and its Relevance for Medical Ethics

9:40am-9:55am: Break

9:55am-10:15am: Student Essay Award and Presentation [Ballroom CD]

10:15am-11:45am: Plenary Three: What is at stake and what is experienced, spiritually, among those who care for patients? [Ballroom CD]

  • Margaret Mohrmann, MD, PhD
  • Ahsan Arozullah, MD, MPH
  • Saul Berman, JD

11:45am-12pm: Closing Remarks [Ballroom CD]

Click below to download a PDF of the conference schedule.

PDF Conference Schedule

Map of Hyatt Regency Cambridge

*Muslim prayer room will be available for use all day [Garrison], Jewish Prayer room will be available for use all day [Sumner]

**Schedule is subject to change