Converting the Disenchanted: Postsecular Possibilities in Modern Healthcare
Brett McCarty, ThD(c), Doctoral Candidate, Duke Divinity School
Charles Taylor ends *A Secular Age* by describing two possible futures for Western religious imagination. One future continues the trajectory of disenchantment to its conclusion, and religious commitments become fringe oddities. But Taylor claims to “foresee another future, based on another supposition” in which those dissatisfied with our disenchanted age begin breaking out of our modern immanent frame. These “religious (re)conversions” enable us to once again make sense of our lives in light of a transcendent reality (768). This paper is an effort to understand the conditions and possibilities of these “religious (re)conversions” within the practices of modern healthcare. It does so by describing medicine’s disenchantment before arguing for how the vision of medical practitioners can be converted through reclaiming marginalized social imaginaries.
Jeffrey Bishop’s *The Anticipatory Corpse* provides a diagnosis of the disenchantment in modern healthcare. Following the work of Michel Foucault, Bishop argues that modern healthcare has lost the possibility for understanding formal and final causality in the body. Because of this, medicine can no longer imagine the body as truly living, storied, and purposive. Instead, the dead body is epistemologically normative. Bishop implies this disenchanted social imaginary is inescapable within the institutions and practices of modern healthcare.
For those interested in re-enchanting modern healthcare, such a diagnosis is dire. However, the institutions and practices of modern healthcare are not as thoroughly dominated by this disenchanted vision as Bishop implies. As Guenter Risse shows in his *Mending Bodies, Saving Souls*, the history of the hospital (and, with it, the practices of healthcare) cannot be told without describing the influence of religious commitments and traditions. Once we begin to look at modern healthcare in light of this history, we can begin to notice that modern healthcare still contains marginalized social imaginaries that are more amenable to an enchanted vision of the world.
By articulating the religious roots of these marginalized social imaginaries, they suddenly become contenders for more compelling ways to give an account of the world in which we live. Drawing from the work of philosophical theologian Graham Ward (who himself draws from feminist standpoint theory) in his *Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice*, we can begin to see how religious visions of the world are well-positioned to interpret, engage, and order other visions into the integrity of a single subject-position. Such a re-ordering is exactly the kind of work Taylor describes as “religious (re)conversions.”
Taylor fills the final chapter of *A Secular Age *with the stories of those who have broken out of the immanent frame into a more enchanted vision of reality. Following his example, the final argument for re-enchanting modern healthcare comes not from philosophers or theologians; instead, it comes through the witness of those who have learned to see and inhabit the world in alternate ways. Fittingly, then, we conclude with the story of how one medical practitioner has re-enchanted modern healthcare through a seemingly mundane but conceptually profound reimagining of the practice of hand sanitization as sacramental preparation for meeting God in the patient.
Charles Taylor ends *A Secular Age* by describing two possible futures for Western religious imagination. One future continues the trajectory of disenchantment to its conclusion, and religious commitments become fringe oddities. But Taylor claims to “foresee another future, based on another supposition” in which those dissatisfied with our disenchanted age begin breaking out of our modern immanent frame. These “religious (re)conversions” enable us to once again make sense of our lives in light of a transcendent reality (768). This paper is an effort to understand the conditions and possibilities of these “religious (re)conversions” within the practices of modern healthcare. It does so by describing medicine’s disenchantment before arguing for how the vision of medical practitioners can be converted through reclaiming marginalized social imaginaries.
Jeffrey Bishop’s *The Anticipatory Corpse* provides a diagnosis of the disenchantment in modern healthcare. Following the work of Michel Foucault, Bishop argues that modern healthcare has lost the possibility for understanding formal and final causality in the body. Because of this, medicine can no longer imagine the body as truly living, storied, and purposive. Instead, the dead body is epistemologically normative. Bishop implies this disenchanted social imaginary is inescapable within the institutions and practices of modern healthcare.
For those interested in re-enchanting modern healthcare, such a diagnosis is dire. However, the institutions and practices of modern healthcare are not as thoroughly dominated by this disenchanted vision as Bishop implies. As Guenter Risse shows in his *Mending Bodies, Saving Souls*, the history of the hospital (and, with it, the practices of healthcare) cannot be told without describing the influence of religious commitments and traditions. Once we begin to look at modern healthcare in light of this history, we can begin to notice that modern healthcare still contains marginalized social imaginaries that are more amenable to an enchanted vision of the world.
By articulating the religious roots of these marginalized social imaginaries, they suddenly become contenders for more compelling ways to give an account of the world in which we live. Drawing from the work of philosophical theologian Graham Ward (who himself draws from feminist standpoint theory) in his *Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice*, we can begin to see how religious visions of the world are well-positioned to interpret, engage, and order other visions into the integrity of a single subject-position. Such a re-ordering is exactly the kind of work Taylor describes as “religious (re)conversions.”
Taylor fills the final chapter of *A Secular Age *with the stories of those who have broken out of the immanent frame into a more enchanted vision of reality. Following his example, the final argument for re-enchanting modern healthcare comes not from philosophers or theologians; instead, it comes through the witness of those who have learned to see and inhabit the world in alternate ways. Fittingly, then, we conclude with the story of how one medical practitioner has re-enchanted modern healthcare through a seemingly mundane but conceptually profound reimagining of the practice of hand sanitization as sacramental preparation for meeting God in the patient.