Conference Theme
Re-Enchanting Medicine
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization
and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.
--Max Weber, 1917
2017 marks the centennial of Max Weber’s lecture, “Science as Vocation,” in which he claimed that the modern world had lost its enchantment. Modern people, Weber argued, are socialized to see the world as merely material, without intrinsic meaning. This disenchantment leads modern cultures to treat nature, including human nature, as substance to be manipulated and controlled, using the latest scientific knowledge and technique, organized by bureaucracy and market forces.
The 2017 Conference on Medicine and Religion considers Weber’s analysis with respect to contemporary health care, and asks what it would look like to re-enchant medicine today? In what sense is the world enchanted? Can the work of clinicians and medical scientists be described as a vocation or calling? If so, what is the nature of this call? Does Weber’s analysis clarify why so many health care practitioners feel like cogs in a machine? How can practitioners, patients and religious communities break through the intellectualization, rationalization, and disenchantment in an era of evidence-based medicine, quality metrics, and electronic medical records?
We invite health care practitioners, scholars, religious community leaders, and students to take up these questions and consider their implications for contemporary medicine. The conference is a forum for exchanging ideas from an array of disciplinary perspectives, from empirical research to scholarship in the humanities to stories of clinical practice. The conference encourages participants to address questions associated with this theme by relating the questions to religious traditions and practices, particularly, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or other world religions.
The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization
and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.
--Max Weber, 1917
2017 marks the centennial of Max Weber’s lecture, “Science as Vocation,” in which he claimed that the modern world had lost its enchantment. Modern people, Weber argued, are socialized to see the world as merely material, without intrinsic meaning. This disenchantment leads modern cultures to treat nature, including human nature, as substance to be manipulated and controlled, using the latest scientific knowledge and technique, organized by bureaucracy and market forces.
The 2017 Conference on Medicine and Religion considers Weber’s analysis with respect to contemporary health care, and asks what it would look like to re-enchant medicine today? In what sense is the world enchanted? Can the work of clinicians and medical scientists be described as a vocation or calling? If so, what is the nature of this call? Does Weber’s analysis clarify why so many health care practitioners feel like cogs in a machine? How can practitioners, patients and religious communities break through the intellectualization, rationalization, and disenchantment in an era of evidence-based medicine, quality metrics, and electronic medical records?
We invite health care practitioners, scholars, religious community leaders, and students to take up these questions and consider their implications for contemporary medicine. The conference is a forum for exchanging ideas from an array of disciplinary perspectives, from empirical research to scholarship in the humanities to stories of clinical practice. The conference encourages participants to address questions associated with this theme by relating the questions to religious traditions and practices, particularly, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or other world religions.