Reimagining Medicine: Theological Formation for Those with Vocations to Health Care
Moderator-
Farr Curlin, M.D., Trent Professor of Medical Humanities, Co-Director, Theology, Medicine and Culture Initiative, Duke University
Panelists-
John Eberly, Medical Student, University of South Carolina
Jennifer Lawson, M.D., Pediatrician, Duke University
Brett McCarty, ThD candidate, Duke University
Jesus taught that when we care for the sick, we care for Jesus himself. Caring for the sick is an important Christian call or vocation. But what does that vocation look like within an American health care system characterized by disenchantment and marked by moral and spiritual turmoil? A system in which patients struggle to get the care they need, and burnout among health care practitioners—including Christians—approaches 50%? How do we bear witness to and participate in the healing ministry of Christ in our present context? In this panel we will present a new model of theological formation which invites those called to health care to deeply explore Christian faith and practice, equipping them for missional, vocational leadership in their work.
Few Christian health practitioners have received any deep theological formation with respect to their work. Except where practices cross a bright line of moral impermissibility, Christian practitioners tend to take the structures and practices of medicine for granted. For example, Christian health practitioners regularly work with patients and families at the end of life, but few have considered how the Christian tradition of living well in the face of death might inform decisions about how, when, and to what extent we use technology to prolong life. Christian doctors and nurses lament the loss of personal contact and connection with their patients, but few have reflected on how modern medicine tends to treat the body as “machine” rather than as “person,” and the extent to which Christian communities have erroneously embraced this view. Christian practitioners have strong opinions about shifting health care policies, but few have examined how the Christian affirmation that Christ is present in the one who is sick might inform debates about health care reform. Christian health practitioners know that the gospel should matter for how medicine is practiced, but they are not practiced in seeing or saying how.
This lack of theological formation, combined with the broader social dynamics toward more bureaucratic, instrumentally driven medicine, leads Christian health practitioners to be increasingly alienated from their work. As a result, many relegate their faith to the “personal” sphere and their work to the “professional,” thereby detaching from the task of discerning how to faithfully fulfill their professions. They experience disenchantment, and their routine, daily practices become increasingly disconnected from their original sense of calling and vocation. They do not know how to describe what is wrong nor how to start again in a new way. Much less are they practiced in turning to the Gospel and Christian tradition for guidance.
This is a problem also for the church. In their book, Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Medicine, Joel Shuman Brian Volck say it is a sign of illness that “most North American Christians approach medicine without much consideration of its relation to their theological convictions.” Of first importance, they suggest, is that, “Christians should always understand themselves as part of a gathered people, integral parts of a community called the Body of Christ. In other words, we never really go to the doctor alone.” But Christians do go to the doctor alone, and Christians health care practitioners care for patients alone—largely detached from their identity in the Body of Christ.
Forming and renewing a theological imagination for health and medicine requires a particular kind of institutional space. Today’s health practitioners receive the great majority of their professional formation within academic medical centers, the structures of which overwhelmingly emphasize empirical and instrumental modes of reasoning. Health practitioners have difficulty finding conversation partners for sustained, serious, Christian theological engagement with the practices of medicine. They also find it challenging to gain the theological formation they need in churches or in other Christian contexts outside the university. Even faith-based health care institutions tend to divide the professional from the personal, the public from the private. Although many pastors and congregations care deeply about health and illness, churches are often not equipped to provide in-depth theological formation for people who work in the health and medical fields.
This panel will present a new program of theological formation situated in a prominent institutional context in which these challenges can be overcome. First, the program is situated in a divinity school that is in close proximity to a world-class medical center. Its faculty includes physicians as well as many others whose scholarship focuses on the body, health, suffering, illness, and death. The program brings health practitioners and ministerial students together in a context that is directly and deeply responsive to the realities of contemporary health care. Students can connect what they are learning in the classroom with what they have experienced and will experience in their clinical domains.
Second, the divinity school in which the program is situated is renowned for theological scholarship and education that is committed to engaging the broader culture with the gospel and historic Christian tradition. Here we engage the academy and the world as equal participants in ongoing public discourse about our common life, not merely as an enclave of individuals working out our “personal values” in private. Here it is consistent with our mission to invite seminarians, clergy, students in the health professions, and practicing clinicians to deep theological study and formation that prepares them to reimagine and reengage their work in the world.
Finally, this program seeks not simply the transmission of knowledge, but formation. Toward that end, formal study occurs within the practices of Christian prayer, worship, and service. In this way, we are all equally participants in a community of theological formation and Christian practice, whether we go out and work in a parish or on a pediatric oncology ward.
In sum, this new program responds to the disenchantment of medicine by inviting practitioners to be transformed by the renewing of their minds. Through practices of engaging Christian tradition, practitioners might gain clarity about the purposes and meaning of their work, about how to attend faithfully to those suffering illness, pain, debility, and death. Through practices of worship and gratitude, they might find encouragement to begin again, with joy, seeking creatively to participate with God’s ministry of suffering presence and healing. Through the formation of scriptural imagination, their eyes might be opened to new possibilities and new practices that bear witness and bring light to contemporary health and medicine.
**Panelists include a physician-ethicist, a physician theologian, and a doctoral student in theology, all of whom help to direct and teach in the program described. In addition, at least one participant in the program will describe his or her experience.
Farr Curlin, M.D., Trent Professor of Medical Humanities, Co-Director, Theology, Medicine and Culture Initiative, Duke University
Panelists-
John Eberly, Medical Student, University of South Carolina
Jennifer Lawson, M.D., Pediatrician, Duke University
Brett McCarty, ThD candidate, Duke University
Jesus taught that when we care for the sick, we care for Jesus himself. Caring for the sick is an important Christian call or vocation. But what does that vocation look like within an American health care system characterized by disenchantment and marked by moral and spiritual turmoil? A system in which patients struggle to get the care they need, and burnout among health care practitioners—including Christians—approaches 50%? How do we bear witness to and participate in the healing ministry of Christ in our present context? In this panel we will present a new model of theological formation which invites those called to health care to deeply explore Christian faith and practice, equipping them for missional, vocational leadership in their work.
Few Christian health practitioners have received any deep theological formation with respect to their work. Except where practices cross a bright line of moral impermissibility, Christian practitioners tend to take the structures and practices of medicine for granted. For example, Christian health practitioners regularly work with patients and families at the end of life, but few have considered how the Christian tradition of living well in the face of death might inform decisions about how, when, and to what extent we use technology to prolong life. Christian doctors and nurses lament the loss of personal contact and connection with their patients, but few have reflected on how modern medicine tends to treat the body as “machine” rather than as “person,” and the extent to which Christian communities have erroneously embraced this view. Christian practitioners have strong opinions about shifting health care policies, but few have examined how the Christian affirmation that Christ is present in the one who is sick might inform debates about health care reform. Christian health practitioners know that the gospel should matter for how medicine is practiced, but they are not practiced in seeing or saying how.
This lack of theological formation, combined with the broader social dynamics toward more bureaucratic, instrumentally driven medicine, leads Christian health practitioners to be increasingly alienated from their work. As a result, many relegate their faith to the “personal” sphere and their work to the “professional,” thereby detaching from the task of discerning how to faithfully fulfill their professions. They experience disenchantment, and their routine, daily practices become increasingly disconnected from their original sense of calling and vocation. They do not know how to describe what is wrong nor how to start again in a new way. Much less are they practiced in turning to the Gospel and Christian tradition for guidance.
This is a problem also for the church. In their book, Reclaiming the Body: Christians and the Faithful Use of Medicine, Joel Shuman Brian Volck say it is a sign of illness that “most North American Christians approach medicine without much consideration of its relation to their theological convictions.” Of first importance, they suggest, is that, “Christians should always understand themselves as part of a gathered people, integral parts of a community called the Body of Christ. In other words, we never really go to the doctor alone.” But Christians do go to the doctor alone, and Christians health care practitioners care for patients alone—largely detached from their identity in the Body of Christ.
Forming and renewing a theological imagination for health and medicine requires a particular kind of institutional space. Today’s health practitioners receive the great majority of their professional formation within academic medical centers, the structures of which overwhelmingly emphasize empirical and instrumental modes of reasoning. Health practitioners have difficulty finding conversation partners for sustained, serious, Christian theological engagement with the practices of medicine. They also find it challenging to gain the theological formation they need in churches or in other Christian contexts outside the university. Even faith-based health care institutions tend to divide the professional from the personal, the public from the private. Although many pastors and congregations care deeply about health and illness, churches are often not equipped to provide in-depth theological formation for people who work in the health and medical fields.
This panel will present a new program of theological formation situated in a prominent institutional context in which these challenges can be overcome. First, the program is situated in a divinity school that is in close proximity to a world-class medical center. Its faculty includes physicians as well as many others whose scholarship focuses on the body, health, suffering, illness, and death. The program brings health practitioners and ministerial students together in a context that is directly and deeply responsive to the realities of contemporary health care. Students can connect what they are learning in the classroom with what they have experienced and will experience in their clinical domains.
Second, the divinity school in which the program is situated is renowned for theological scholarship and education that is committed to engaging the broader culture with the gospel and historic Christian tradition. Here we engage the academy and the world as equal participants in ongoing public discourse about our common life, not merely as an enclave of individuals working out our “personal values” in private. Here it is consistent with our mission to invite seminarians, clergy, students in the health professions, and practicing clinicians to deep theological study and formation that prepares them to reimagine and reengage their work in the world.
Finally, this program seeks not simply the transmission of knowledge, but formation. Toward that end, formal study occurs within the practices of Christian prayer, worship, and service. In this way, we are all equally participants in a community of theological formation and Christian practice, whether we go out and work in a parish or on a pediatric oncology ward.
In sum, this new program responds to the disenchantment of medicine by inviting practitioners to be transformed by the renewing of their minds. Through practices of engaging Christian tradition, practitioners might gain clarity about the purposes and meaning of their work, about how to attend faithfully to those suffering illness, pain, debility, and death. Through practices of worship and gratitude, they might find encouragement to begin again, with joy, seeking creatively to participate with God’s ministry of suffering presence and healing. Through the formation of scriptural imagination, their eyes might be opened to new possibilities and new practices that bear witness and bring light to contemporary health and medicine.
**Panelists include a physician-ethicist, a physician theologian, and a doctoral student in theology, all of whom help to direct and teach in the program described. In addition, at least one participant in the program will describe his or her experience.