This paper analyses the relationship between religion and the field of medicine and health care in light of other recent studies. Generally, religion and spirituality have a positive impact on disease. For patients diagnosed with malignancies and chronic diseases, religion is an important dimension of healing. From ancient times, God has been considered an inspiration for the physician's knowledge and healing resources. Some authors have proposed a brief history of spiritual and religious states that the doctor (...) can apply to his patient. Religiosity and spirituality allow patients to receive better social support and to benefit greatly from resources provided by religious organizations (cultural activities, jobs, and health care counseling). The two terms "religion" and "spirituality" have different meanings but are always in connection. Many studies emphasize that people with greater religiosity and spirituality have a lower prevalence of depression and suicide, better quality of life, and greater survival. Additionally the article discusses the complementary health care benefits of religious fasting. Caloric and protein restrictions promoted by religious fasting were associated with improvement in control or prophylaxis of many diseases and with longevity. (shrink)

Patient and family demands for the initiation or continuation of life-sustaining medically non-beneficial treatments continues to be a major issue. This is especially relevant in intensive care units, but is also a challenge in other settings, most notably with cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Differences of opinion between physicians and patients/families about what are appropriate interventions in specific clinical situations are often fraught with highly strained emotions, and perhaps none more so when the family bases their desires on religious belief. In this essay, (...) I discuss non-beneficial treatments in light of these sorts of disputes, when there is a clash between the nominally secular world of fact- and evidence-based medicine and the faith-based world of hope for a miraculous cure. I ask the question whether religious belief can justify providing treatment that has either no or a vanishly small chance of restoring meaningful function. I conclude that non-beneficial therapy by its very definition cannot be helpful, and indeed is often harmful, to patients and hence cannot be justified no matter what the source or kind of reasons used to support its use. Therefore, doctors may legitimately refuse to provide such treatments, so long as they do so for acceptable clinical reasons. They must also offer alternatives, including second opinions, as well the option of transferring the care of the patient to a more accommodating physician or institution. (shrink)

This article examines various meanings of solitude in eighteenth-century Europe, with emphasis on French thought and culture. Part 1 is a survey of literary representations of solitude and contemplation. Part II is devoted to the Jansenist convulsionnaires, Catholic dissidents who took part in a larger appeal against the repressive Unigenitus Bull of 1713. Although the convulsionary movement sought to attract crowds and publicity, it was also grounded in a Jansenist tradition of spiritual retreat that was emulated by the movement’s de (...) facto patron saint, the appellant deacon François de Pâris. Part III features writings by Zimmermann and Tissot, who medicalized solitude for three reasons: belief in the ethos of sociability, concern over the pathogenic powers of the imagination, and suspicion towards the passions that drove some people to fix their minds exclusively on certain ideas. To show solitude’s harmful consequences for those who spent too much time absorbed in ideas, they made intriguing connections between secular knowledge-seekers and the religiously devout. The Jansenist convulsionnaires were one of the dangerously zealous groups whom they cited to illustrate their arguments. (shrink)

The Medieval Islamic Hospital: Medicine, Religion, and Charity. By Ahmed Ragab. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii + 263. $99.99, £64.99, $80.

Abstractabstract:This essay proposes an unconventional approach to teaching "religion and medicine" to American medical students. Received frameworks for such teaching—articulated around faith denomination or "spirituality"—may imply that religiosities and their health effects are grounded in theology or transcendence, respectively. These frameworks may reify, or misrepresent relationships between, religion and science—for example, in supporting notions of conflict, or of an essentially secular character of technical progress. They can neglect ways in which biomedicine and its institutions are themselves engaged (...) with and productive of religious values. In order to move toward fuller student appreciation of diverse religious materialities and embodiments in health and biomedicine, the essay proposes "the sacred, in practice" as an organizing rubric. This pedagogical intervention pivots on notions of sacrality in anthropologies of religion and offers students a wide path to consider a spectrum of material, gestural conditions, and activities—transformative techniques, intensely valued objects, trusted texts, rituals—that mark and propagate religious valences and commitments within and around contemporary biomedicine. This sacred-in-practice approach meshes with standard theological and spiritual framings of the religion/health/medicine nexus, yet offers more capacious and flexible connections to work for which medical students are training, involving vulnerable bodies and material technologies of tremendous life- and world-shaping potency. (shrink)

One of the most common contemporary approaches for developing an ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) involves elaborating guiding principles. This essay explores the limitations of this approach, using the history of bioethics as a comparative case. The examples of bioethics and recent AI ethics suggest that principles are difficult to implement in everyday practice, fail to direct individual action, and can frequently result in a pure proceduralism. The essay encourages an additional attention to virtue, which forms the dispositions of actors, (...) directs them to valued ends, and encourages right action in particular situation to complement principles. Practices and professions like medicine or warfighting that already have rich traditions of reflection on virtue ethics will be especially fruitful fields for developing an AI ethics of virtue. (shrink)

Religion, belief and culture should be recognized as potential sources of moral purpose and personal strength in healthcare, enhancing the welfare of both clinicians and patients amidst the experience of ill-health, healing, suffering and dying. Communication between doctors and patients and between healthcare staff should attend sensitively to the welfare benefits of religion, belief and culture. Doctors should respect personal religious and cultural commitments, taking account of their significance for treatment and care preferences. Good doctors understand their own (...) beliefs and those of others. They hold that patient welfare is best served by understanding the importance of religion, belief and culture to patients and colleagues. The sensitive navigation of differences between people's religions, beliefs and cultures is part of doctors' civic obligations and in the UK should follow the guidance of the General Medical Council and Department of Health. In particular, apparent conflict between clinical judgement or normal practices and a patient's culture, religion and belief should be considered carefully. Doctors' own religion or culture may play an important role in promoting adherence to this good practice. In all matters, doctors' conduct should be governed by the law and arrangements for conscientious objection that are in effect. (shrink)

This essay introduces this special issue on virtue ethics in relation to military AI. It describes the current situation of military AI ethics as following that of AI ethics in general, caught between consequentialism and deontology. Virtue ethics serves as an alternative that can address some of the weaknesses of these dominant forms of ethics. The essay describes how the articles in the issue exemplify the value of virtue-related approaches for these questions, before ending with thoughts for further research.

In a recent article entitled, Requests "for inappropriate" treatment based on religious beliefs, Orr and Genesen claim that futile treatment should be provided to patients who request it if their request is based on a religious belief. I claim that this implies that we should also accede to requests for harmful or cost-ineffective treatments based on religious beliefs. This special treatment of religious requests is an example of special pleading on the part of theists and morally objectionable discrimination against atheists. (...) It also provides an excellent illustration of how different the practices of religion and ethics are. (shrink)

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of figures -- Contributors -- Acknowledgements -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Philip Melanchthon and his significance for natural philosophy -- 3 Daniel Sennert and the chymico-atomical reform of medicine -- 4 The changing face of Lutheranism in post-Reformation Denmark -- 5 After Tycho: Philippist astronomy and cosmology in the work of Brahe's Scandinavian assistants -- 6 The Book of Nature and the Word of God: Lutheran natural philosophy and medicine (...) in early-seventeenth-century Denmark and Norway -- 7 Holger Rosenkrantz, 'the Learned' (1574-1642). (shrink)

With a new introduction by Michael Ruse, this book will reintroduce Bertrand Russell's writings to readers and students of philosophy and religion. Russell provides an insightful study of the historical conflicts between science and traditional religion until the beginning of the Second World War. In a wide range of topics, including evolution, demonology and medicine, sould and body, determinism, mysticism, and science and ethics, Russell provides historic events in which scientific breakthroughs clashed with Christian doctrine. Through these (...) examples, we find in history a constant upheaval and re-evaluation of our systems of belief, and identify where similar debates between modern science and the Church still exist today. (shrink)

Research and writing at the intersection of faith and medicine by now include thousands of published studies, review articles, books, chapters, and essays. Yet this emerging field has been described, from within, as disheveled on account of imprecision and lack of careful attention to conceptual and theoretical concerns. An important source of confusion is the fact that scholarship in this field constitutes two distinct literatures, or rather meta-literatures, which can be termed faith as a problematic for medicine and (...) medicine as a problematic for faith. These categories represent distinct theoretical lenses for viewing the intersection of faith and medicine. Observations about these two approaches are offered, along with insights about why the discourse on faith and medicine should become better integrated into discussions of religion and science. (shrink)

Patients belonging to ethnic, racial, and religious minorities have been all but excluded from the legal academy’s ongoing conversation about informed consent. Perhaps this is just as well, since the conversation appears to have concluded that the doctrine has failed to serve as a meaningful regulation of clinical relationships. Informed consent does not operate in practice the way it was intended in theory. More than a decade ago, Peter Schuck noted the “informed consent gap” that distinguishes the “proper” law of (...) informed consent “on the books” from the actual consent law in action, and called for a more contextualized approach to informed consent. Susan Wolf later called for a systemic approach to informed consent in order to accommodate multiple decision points in the managed care setting. Some reformers have sought enhancements to expand the doctrine. (shrink)

Physician religion/spirituality has the potential to influence the communication between physicians and parents of children at the end of life. In order to explore this relationship, the authors conducted two rounds of narrative interviews to examine pediatric physicians’ perspectives (N=17) of how their religious/spiritual beliefs affect end–of–life communication and care. Grounded theory informed the design and analysis of the study. As a proxy for religiosity/spirituality, physicians were classified into the following groups based on the extent to which religious/spiritual language (...) was infused into their responses: Religiously Rich Responders (RRR), Moderately Religious Responders (MRR), and Low Religious Responders (LRR). Twelve of the 17 participants (71%) were classified into the RRR or MRR groups. The majority of participants suggested that religion/spirituality played a role in their practice of medicine and communication with parents in a myriad of ways and to varying degrees. Participants used their religious/spiritual beliefs to support families’ spirituality, uphold hope, participate in prayer, and alleviate their own emotional distress emerging from their patients’ deaths. (shrink)

This second volume of Raimon Panikkar's Opera Omnia offers Panikkar's reflections on religion in our era as well as in many other historical epochs. Because no particular religion can claim to exhaust the universal range of human experience, Panikkar argues that in a globalized world, a kind of religious pluralism is a necessary reality, and dialogue between different religions, cultures, and worldviews is an imperative of our time. The first section of this volume expands on the concept of (...) religion from different viewpoints and develops some of the most universal aspects of religiosity. The second deals with comparative religion and with the religious philosophy of encounter, while the third section includes more specific topics, among which are the body and medicine, because religion reconnects not just humanity to God, but also the spirit to the body. Raimon Panikkar (1918-2010) made pioneering contributions to interreligious dialogue, comparative theology, and the phenomenology of religion while bridging different religions and cultures (Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism), and advanced the global conversation between the so-called sacred and secular worlds. These diverse contributions were tied together in a unifying vision he called his cosmotheandric intuition, the deep interconnection of the Divine, the Cosmic, and the Human. (Publisher). (shrink)

In Medicine, Society, and Faith in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds Darrel Amundsen explores the disputed boundaries of medicine and Christianity by focusing on the principle of the sanctity of human life, including the duty to treat or attempt to sustain the life of the ill. As he examines his themes and moves from text to context, Amundsen clarifies a number of Christian principles in relation to bioethical issues that are hotly debated today. In his examination of the (...) moral stance of the earliest syphilographers, for example, he finds insights into the ethical issues surrounding the treatment of AIDS, which he believes has its closest historical antecedent not in plague but in syphilis. He also shows that the belief that all healing comes from God, whether directly, through prayer, or through the use of medicine -- a sentiment commonly held by contemporary Christians -- cannot be accurately attributed to any extant source from the patristic period. Indeed, all the Church Fathers were convinced that healing sometimes came from evil sources: Satan and his demons were able to heal, for example, and Asclepius was a demon "to be taken very seriously indeed.". (shrink)

Before asking what U.S. bioethics might learn from a more comprehensive and more nuanced understanding of Islamic religion, history, and culture, a prior question is, how should bioethics think about religion? Two sets of commonly held assumptions impede further progress and insight. The first involves what “religion” means and how one should study it. The second is a prominent philosophical view of the role of religion in a diverse, democratic society. To move beyond these assumptions, it (...) helps to view religion as lived experience as well as a body of doctrine and to see that religious differences and controversies should be welcomed in the public square of a diverse democratic society rather than merely tolerated. (shrink)

This practical guide summarizes the principles of working with dying patients and their families as influenced by the commoner world religions and secular philosophies. It also outlines the main legal requirements to be followed by those who care for the dying following the death of the patient. The first part of the book provides a reflective introduction to the general influences of world religions on matters to do with dying, death and grief. It considers the sometimes conflicting relationships between ethics, (...) religion, culture and personal philosophies and how these differences impact on individual cases of dying, death and loss. The second part describes the general customs and beliefs of the major religions that are encountered in hospitals, hospices, care homes and home care settings. It also includes discussion of non-religious spirituality, humanism, agnosticism and atheism. The final part outlines key socio-legal aspects of death across the UK. Death, Religion and Law provides key knowledge, discussion and reflection for dealing with the diversity of the everyday care of dying and death in different religious, secular and cultural contexts. It is an important reference for practitioners working with dying patients, their families and the bereaved. (shrink)

Especially after the 1610s, Tridentine Catholicism forcefully reasserted itself as a prominent political and intellectual force in the Spanish Netherlands. Integrating this reality into accounts of Spanish-Netherlandish science in the 17th century has been a considerable challenge for historians of science. The latter either turned their gazes elsewhere or assumed a fundamental incompatibility between “science” and “religion,” thus securing one dominant explanation for the classic thesis that the Spanish Netherlands largely “lost the plot” of the so-called Scientific Revolution after (...) the 1620s. This paper turns to a local debate on Thomas Fienus's embryological theses (1620), which has never been studied, to test the underlying assumption that “science” and “religion” can be taken as two distinct and/or opposed categories of historical analysis. I show that this assumption not only fails to capture historical actors' experiences and understandings, but also that it fails to consider how tensions between medicine and theology were positively productive. First, I argue that medical philosophizing was positively motivated by socio-religious concerns of its own. Second, I show that, far from being a protracted battle between two stable positions, the debate constituted an instance of boundary work, where medical philosophers like Fienus progressively tested and repositioned the theological credentials of their preferred theses. This ushered in the adoption of a probabilistic epistemology that increasingly secured Catholic theology's normative credibility and the pursuit of autonomous natural-philosophical inquiry. (shrink)

Few topics in medical ethics stimulate as much heated debate as the question of the proper place of religious beliefs in medical practice. Typically, this debate is orientated towards questions about the religious beliefs held by medical practitioners, and in particular the appropriate limits that ought to be placed on these beliefs shaping care in ways that might impact negatively on patients’ interests. In this issue, however, it is the religious beliefs of patients themselves, and how these beliefs ought to (...) be responded to by clinicians, that is the focus of analysis. In their Feature Article, Greenblum and Hubbard (pages 705–10) articulate a strong position in response to this issue. Their fundamental claim is that clinicians should not deliberate about religious commitments with religious patients when these patients are drawing on these commitments in the medical decision-making process. They present two main arguments in support of this claim: the public reason argument and the fiduciary argument, and they contend that the discussion of religious considerations should be compartmentalised and farmed out to another appropriately placed person, such as a member of the clergy. Stimulating six commentaries that interrogate aspects of both arguments and the authors’ practical proposal, Greenblum and Hubbard’s paper gets to the heart of the challenge of reconciling the public role of medical practitioners with the private encounters that substantiate the performance of this role. Greenblum and Hubbard’s first argument is that clinicians ought to limit their deliberations in decisions made with patients to presenting ‘considerations that any reasonable person could recognise as counting in favour of something’ (page 707). Drawing on the work of John Rawls and Robert Audi, the authors discount the place of religious reasons in …. (shrink)

As science and religion researchers begin to engage questions of mental health, mindfulness may prove to be a fruitful area of investigation. However, quantifying the physical effects of mindfulness on the brain is difficult because mindfulness deals with the problem of mental and physical interaction or, the mind/body problem. One system of understanding which may aid science and religion scholars in the pursuit of mindfulness is traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Within TCM, heart Qi manages the body's present (...) connection to time and space. If the “being in the moment” is disrupted, then the heart Qi is blocked and mental illness or various neurological disorders occur. Succinctly, within TCM, mindfulness is understood as a nonphysical phenomenon (Qi) which directly affects physical systems, resulting in empirical data. This is tracked and treated through the TCM understanding of Qi. The TCM view of Qi in mental health may therefore provide a helpful new paradigm to investigations concerning mindfulness and the human brain. (shrink)

The role of religion in clinical ethics consultations is contested. The religion of the ethics consultant _can be_ an important part of the consultation process and improve the quality of a consultation. Practicing neighbor love leads to empathy, which not only can improve the quality of ethics consultations but also creates a space for religion to be part of, but not imposed on, the consultation. The practice of empathy will build trust, rapport, and an intersubjective connection that (...) improves the quality of the consultation. (The views expressed are the author’s and not representative of any institution or employer). (shrink)

Most quantitative studies that survey nurses’ attitudes toward euthanasia and/or assisted suicide, also attempt to assess the influence of religion on these attitudes. We wanted to evaluate the operationalisation of religion and world view in these surveys. In the Pubmed database we searched for relevant articles published before August 2008 using combinations of search terms. Twenty-eight relevant articles were found. In five surveys nurses were directly asked whether religious beliefs, religious practices and/or ideological convictions influenced their attitudes, or (...) the respondents were requested to mention the decisional basis for their answers on questions concerning end-of-life issues. In other surveys the influence of religion and world view was assessed indirectly through a comparison of the attitudes of different types of believers and/or non-believers toward euthanasia or assisted suicide. In these surveys we find subjective religious or ideological questions (questions inquiring about the perceived importance of religion or world view in life, influence of religion or world view on life in general, or how religious the respondents consider themselves) and objective questions (questions inquiring about religious practice, acceptance of religious dogmas, and religious or ideological affiliation). Religious or ideological affiliation is the most frequently used operationalisation of religion and world view. In 16 surveys only one religious or ideological question was asked. In most articles the operationalisation of religion and world view is very limited and does not reflect the diversity and complexity of religion and world view in contemporary society. Future research should pay more attention to the different dimensions of religion and world view, the religious plurality of Western society and the particularities of religion in non-Western contexts. (shrink)