Re-enchanting Medicine: A Pan-Abrahamic-Hellenic Vision for Human Flourishing in Medical Education
Joelle Worm, MPA, Kern National Network for Flourishing in Health, Elizabeth Rizk, Creighton University School of Medicine, and Sami Shaher Ahmad, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine
Modern medical education often overlooks the moral, spiritual, and existential dimensions of training (Shapiro et al., 2009). Medical students enter a clinical arena where they encounter suffering, death, inequity, injustice, and moral dissonance—experiences that shape their identity yet rarely receive structured space for reflection or integration of spirituality (Bryan & Babely, 2021; Kaldjian, 2010). A growing body of literature points to the emotional and moral cost of this silence. Accumulated grief, disillusionment, and the dissonance between medicine’s ideals and its practice contribute to disengagement, cynicism, and moral injury (West et al., 2018). “Professionalism” risks becoming a checklist rather than a lived practice of virtue (Cruess et al., 2014). Students embark on their training to serve and heal, but amid systemic pressures, the formative promise of medicine fades into disillusionment, moral fatigue and despair (Rushton, 2018).
In this panel, spirituality will be discussed as an orientation toward transcendence, mystery, and meaning. Whether expressed through prayer, contemplation, or meditative silence, spirituality nurtures the awareness that medicine is more than technical mastery; it is participation in the care of the soul. Reflection and spirituality serve as twin movements toward human wholeness and flourishing: one looking inward to discern and name experience, the other reaching outward and upward toward connection with something greater. In these practices, learners encounter the philosophical truth that to heal another, one must first cultivate unity within oneself. This is the essence of phronesis—practical wisdom grounded not only in moral reasoning but in spiritual attentiveness, compassion, and love.
This panel proposes the renewal of moral-spiritual formation to recover the deeper philosophical and theological foundations of medicine as an art of flourishing, a lineage rooted in the classical Mediterranean synthesis of Greek, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought. Drawing on the newly recovered Arabic translation of Galen’s On Medical Experience—which declares that “the art of healing was originally invented and discovered by the logos in conjunction with experience” (Galen, trans. 1944)—we revisit a worldview where logos (reason, word, meaning) and empeiria (lived practice) co-constitute medicine.
Islamic metaphysics’ imagination (khayal) is an epistemic bridge linking the sensory and spiritual realms, a faculty through which revelation, intuition, and moral vision emerge (Nasr, 2007). For Mulla Ṣadrā imagination mediates resurrection itself—the transformation of being through love and knowledge. Such a conception affirms that imagination is not mere fantasy but an essential cognitive and moral capacity for perceiving the good—a principle echoed centuries later by Einstein’s claim that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” Reclaiming imagination in medicine allows for the re-enchantment of healing: understanding clinical reasoning as inseparable from empathy, creativity, and moral insight and allows for the potential for true cultural and systemic change.
A national program with a novel framework for flourishing represents a Neo-Aristotelian approach toward this reintegration. The framework defines flourishing as human wholeness (Su, 2020) marked by integrity, resilience, and meaning within vocation (Bryan & Babely, 2021). By situating reflection as a practice of virtue—cultivating humility, courage, and empathy—the framework advances medicine as a moral art aimed at eudaimonia, the good life in right relation to others and the divine. Yet, as Kristjánsson (2016) notes, Aristotelian virtue alone risks remaining “disenchanted,” emphasizing worldly rationality while neglecting transcendence. Islamic and late-antique thought resolve this divide: Avicenna and Al-Fārābī wove together reason, virtue, and contemplation into a unified account of human happiness, a synthesis that could inform contemporary bioethics and moral education.
Ignatian pedagogy, already at work in modern reflection curricula, offers another living expression of this synthesis. The Ignatian Examen calls learners to reflect on their daily encounters, discern moral movement, and find God in all things (Traub, 2008). By merging Ignatian practices with the framework, we can re-situate reflection as both an epistemological and spiritual exercise—restoring medicine’s original character as therapeia, care for body and soul. Within this ecumenical conversation, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish perspectives converge around a shared metaphysical insight: that healing is participation in divine order, that love is the animating motion of the cosmos, and that the physician’s work is moral as well as technical.
Panel participants will explore these convergences through three lenses historical, theoretical and practical. In re-animating this “pan-Abrahamic-Hellenic” dialogue, the panel seeks to recover medicine’s original vocation: not merely to treat disease, but to heal the person and community through wisdom, love, and contemplation. The result is an invitation to imagine a medicine once more attuned to the logos—an enlightened medicine for a fragmented age.
In this panel, spirituality will be discussed as an orientation toward transcendence, mystery, and meaning. Whether expressed through prayer, contemplation, or meditative silence, spirituality nurtures the awareness that medicine is more than technical mastery; it is participation in the care of the soul. Reflection and spirituality serve as twin movements toward human wholeness and flourishing: one looking inward to discern and name experience, the other reaching outward and upward toward connection with something greater. In these practices, learners encounter the philosophical truth that to heal another, one must first cultivate unity within oneself. This is the essence of phronesis—practical wisdom grounded not only in moral reasoning but in spiritual attentiveness, compassion, and love.
This panel proposes the renewal of moral-spiritual formation to recover the deeper philosophical and theological foundations of medicine as an art of flourishing, a lineage rooted in the classical Mediterranean synthesis of Greek, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought. Drawing on the newly recovered Arabic translation of Galen’s On Medical Experience—which declares that “the art of healing was originally invented and discovered by the logos in conjunction with experience” (Galen, trans. 1944)—we revisit a worldview where logos (reason, word, meaning) and empeiria (lived practice) co-constitute medicine.
Islamic metaphysics’ imagination (khayal) is an epistemic bridge linking the sensory and spiritual realms, a faculty through which revelation, intuition, and moral vision emerge (Nasr, 2007). For Mulla Ṣadrā imagination mediates resurrection itself—the transformation of being through love and knowledge. Such a conception affirms that imagination is not mere fantasy but an essential cognitive and moral capacity for perceiving the good—a principle echoed centuries later by Einstein’s claim that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” Reclaiming imagination in medicine allows for the re-enchantment of healing: understanding clinical reasoning as inseparable from empathy, creativity, and moral insight and allows for the potential for true cultural and systemic change.
A national program with a novel framework for flourishing represents a Neo-Aristotelian approach toward this reintegration. The framework defines flourishing as human wholeness (Su, 2020) marked by integrity, resilience, and meaning within vocation (Bryan & Babely, 2021). By situating reflection as a practice of virtue—cultivating humility, courage, and empathy—the framework advances medicine as a moral art aimed at eudaimonia, the good life in right relation to others and the divine. Yet, as Kristjánsson (2016) notes, Aristotelian virtue alone risks remaining “disenchanted,” emphasizing worldly rationality while neglecting transcendence. Islamic and late-antique thought resolve this divide: Avicenna and Al-Fārābī wove together reason, virtue, and contemplation into a unified account of human happiness, a synthesis that could inform contemporary bioethics and moral education.
Ignatian pedagogy, already at work in modern reflection curricula, offers another living expression of this synthesis. The Ignatian Examen calls learners to reflect on their daily encounters, discern moral movement, and find God in all things (Traub, 2008). By merging Ignatian practices with the framework, we can re-situate reflection as both an epistemological and spiritual exercise—restoring medicine’s original character as therapeia, care for body and soul. Within this ecumenical conversation, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish perspectives converge around a shared metaphysical insight: that healing is participation in divine order, that love is the animating motion of the cosmos, and that the physician’s work is moral as well as technical.
Panel participants will explore these convergences through three lenses historical, theoretical and practical. In re-animating this “pan-Abrahamic-Hellenic” dialogue, the panel seeks to recover medicine’s original vocation: not merely to treat disease, but to heal the person and community through wisdom, love, and contemplation. The result is an invitation to imagine a medicine once more attuned to the logos—an enlightened medicine for a fragmented age.