Authors-Meet-Critics: Hostility to Hospitality - Spirituality and Professional Socialization within Medicine (Oxford 2019)
Co-Authors: Michael Balboni, ThM, PhD (Harvard) and Tracy Balboni, MD, MPH (Harvard). Critics: Lydia Dugdale, MD, MAR (Yale), Dan Blazer, MD, PhD (Duke), Jonathan Crane, PhD (Emory), and Jonathan Imber, PhD (Wellesley)
Moderator: Ashley Acken, MDiv (Duke)
Spiritual sickness troubles American medicine. Through a death-denying culture, medicine has gained enormous power—an influence it maintains by distancing itself from religion and spirituality, which too often reminds us of our mortality. As a result of this separation of medicine from spiritual traditions, patients facing serious illness infrequently receive adequate spiritual care, despite the large body of empirical data demonstrating its import to patient meaning-making, quality of life, and medical utilization. This secular-sacred divide also unleashes depersonalizing, social forces through the market, technology, and legal-bureaucratic powers that reduce clinicians to tiny cogs in an unstoppable machine.
A recent book, "Hostility to Hospitality: Spirituality and Professional Socialization within Medicine" (Oxford University Press, 2018) is one of the first books of its kind to explore these hostilities threatening medicine and offer a path forward for the partnership of modern medicine and spirituality. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship including empirical studies, interviews, history and sociology, theology, and public policy, the authors argue for structural pluralism as the missing piece to changing hostility to hospitality.
As a panel session, the book's authors will present the outline and central claims of the book. The panel will then have four respondents provide brief critical remarks, allowing for exchange with the authors. The session will also allow adequate time for audience participation.
A recent book, "Hostility to Hospitality: Spirituality and Professional Socialization within Medicine" (Oxford University Press, 2018) is one of the first books of its kind to explore these hostilities threatening medicine and offer a path forward for the partnership of modern medicine and spirituality. Drawing from interdisciplinary scholarship including empirical studies, interviews, history and sociology, theology, and public policy, the authors argue for structural pluralism as the missing piece to changing hostility to hospitality.
As a panel session, the book's authors will present the outline and central claims of the book. The panel will then have four respondents provide brief critical remarks, allowing for exchange with the authors. The session will also allow adequate time for audience participation.