Duke Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative

In the profession of medicine and the current world where demands on our attention are many and constant. John Hardt, Vice Dean of Professional Formation and Associate Professor of Bioethics at Loyola University of Chicago, is the co-director of the Physician's Vocation Program. The program teaches on virtue, character, and calling in medicine, reflecting on religious themes in medicine through the practices of St. Ignatius. In this TMC seminar, Dr. Hardt discusses the program, which serves as a training ground for attending to God’s love for us and his presence in our lives. In so doing, it works to seed the practice of medicine with physicians who have a deep sense of purpose, a joyful spirit, and a commitment to the practice of medicine as an act of service, compassion, and healing.

TMC Seminar Series Health Equity Is Not a Spectator Sport- A Radical Rerooting Using a Three Trees Analogy- by Duke Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative

Susan Eastman, M.Div., Ph.D., is Associate Research Professor Emerita of New Testament, Duke Divinity School. She presented "Christian Flourishing and Reimagining Healthcare: An End to Magical Thinking" for the TMC Virtual Seminar Series on January 24, 2025. "Magical thinking" is "if-then" thinking, which plays an important role in medical research and care, but falters in the face of mystery and the infinite diversity of human beings, and leads to a truncated version of human "flourishing." Christian thinking is "because-therefore" -- because God in Christ has entered into the depths of what is humanly unfixable, therefore we can articulate a vision of flourishing that includes even failure and finitude, and acknowledges the mysteries that elude our grasp. We will probe the differences such a reframing of "flourishing" might make for the care of persons.

Dr. Annie Friedrich joined TMC for a virtual seminar on Friday, October 11th, 2024. Dr. Friedrich is an Assistant Professor of Bioethics and Medical Humanities in the Institute for Health & Equity at the Medical College of Wisconsin. She received her PhD in Health Care Ethics from Saint Louis University with a focus on clinical ethics, pediatric ethics, and empirical research methods. She is a certified clinical ethics consultant (HEC-C) and is the co-chair of the ethics committee at Children’s Wisconsin, in addition to serving on other affiliated ethics committees. She is also an ethics educator and teaches bioethics to medical students, graduate students, and other health professionals. This seminar, titled "Flourishing in the Cracks: Cultivating Moral Resilience in the Midst of Moral Distress," explores moral complexity, confusion, uncertainty, and distress as inevitable features of the healthcare system. Leaving this distress unacknowledged and unresolved can lead to frustration, lack of meaning in work, and burnout. In this presentation, Dr. Friedrich examines the moral and spiritual dimensions of wellbeing and burnout, with a particular focus on factors contributing to moral distress, and will discuss how we can build flourishing, morally resilient communities for both patients and practitioners.

Dr. Matthew Rubach, Associate Professor in the School of Medicine & Associate Research Professor in the Global Health Institute at Duke, offered a TMC seminar in March, 2024. Dr. Rubach is a specialist in clinical infectious diseases with medical specialty training in Pediatrics, Internal Medicine and Medical Microbiology. Since November 2015, he has been based full-time as a clinical researcher and clinician in Moshi, Tanzania where he serves as Co-Director of the Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC)-Duke Health Collaboration. He conducts clinical research on causes of severe febrile illness, sepsis management, vascular pathology of severe malaria, and zoonotic disease epidemiology. In addition to clinical research, he serves as Medical Director of the laboratory that supports clinical investigation at KCMC and he provides medical care & training in the HIV clinic and Medical Ward of KCMC. In this TMC seminar, "Colonialism, Global Health & Catholic Social Teaching: Notes from a Decade at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre," Dr. Rubach presents his work and experience at KCMC through the lens of Catholic social teaching.

On February 17, 2024 Dr. Andrew Michel, Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Belmont University, presented "Toward a Neo-Salesian Spirituality for Students of Medicine." In it, he hopes that DeSales, the doctor of divine love, might inflame a Neo-Saleisan Pentecost in contemporary medicine. He invites healers to take a posture of humility and others-centered surrender in their practice of healing. In so doing, healers could also become agents of social change sent out as apostles into the contemporary healthcare ecosystem. He goes on, "In the solidarity of missional friendship, such a Neo-Salesian physician-apostle might reawaken justice alongside healing in a land parched and fragmented by inequities, caught up in the spirit of a neocapitalist age that has forgotten the true ends of healing and wholeness for all people. In becoming physician-apostolates in these secular spaces, each Neo-Salesian medical practitioner would be a little brother or sister of Jesus of Nazareth–heart on fire, with divine love, in mission to reenchant medicine like yeast worked all through the dough." Andrew Michel, M.D. is Associate Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Integrated Medical Education at the Frist College of Medicine at Belmont University, where he currently serves as the curriculum committee chair. Dr. Michel earned his M.D. from Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and completed the Harvard Longwood Psychiatry Residency Training Program; Dr. Michel is a board-certified psychiatrist. Dr. Michel’s scholarship has focused on the interface of philosophy (virtue ethics), theology, contemplative spirituality, and clinical psychiatry. Dr. Michel’s academic ventures are heavily informed by clinical experience in caring for persons who suffer with a range of mental health challenges, including trauma, addiction, and disruptions of mood and cognition. Dr. Michel’s style of practice has a contemplative foundation, centered in being deeply present in solidarity with persons who suffer with psychiatric illness, with the aim of healing and flourishing in the context of vulnerability.

On Friday, February 2, 2024, TMC hosted Finnegan-Hosey for this virtual seminar titled, "Stewarding Sacred Stories: A Shared Vocation." David is the author of "Christ on the Psych Ward" and "Grace is a Pre-Existing Condition: Faith, Systems, and Mental Healthcare." He currently serves as the minister of Bon Air Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), having previously worked in a variety of campus ministry, non-profit, and congregational settings. He holds an M.Div. from Wesley Theological Seminary and a unit of Clinical Pastoral Education from the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center.

The Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative (TMC) welcomed Dr. Elaine Eng for this virtual seminar on October 27, 2023. Elaine Eng, M.D., is a graduate of Princeton University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She is a professor of mental health counseling who integrates faith, medicine, and psychology in her international and local work as an educator, psychiatrist, and author. Dr. Eng was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa in hear adulthood. Her impending blindness meant that she would no longer be able to practice as an obstetrician/gynecologist. Dr. Eng shares a compelling story of faith and commitment to medicine amidst adversity in this virtual seminar. Dr. Eng's books include "The Transforming Power of Story: How Telling Your Story Brings Hope to Others and Healing to Yourself," and "A Christian Approach to Overcoming Disability: A Doctor's Story."

The Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative (TMC) welcomed Dr. Brewer Eberly for this virtual seminar on September 8, 2023. He is a third-generation family physician at Fischer Clinic in Raleigh, NC, and a McDonald Agape Fellow in the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School. He completed his family medicine residency and chief residency at AnMed Health in Anderson, SC. Dr. Eberly has been published widely, including JAMA, the New Atlantis, and Christianity Today, with artwork on the cover of Academic Medicine and in the AMA Journal of Ethics. While the majority of his work is caring for his patients, his writing and research is rooted in the intersections of medicine, aesthetics, and Christian theology, with a particular eye toward medical trainee formation, the relationship between beauty and ethics, and the nourishment of weary clinicians.

Dr. Daisey Dowell specializes in Pediatrics for Lawndale Christian Health Center on Chicago's Westside. In addition to serving as a domestic medical missionary at Lawndale, she also serves as a foreign medical missionary to Haiti as part of El Shaddai Ministry’s, “Haiti Orphan Project” -- where she serves along with other medical and nonmedical personnel to bring medical care along with the Gospel, to orphanages and their surrounding communities in the more remote areas of Haiti. Dr. Dowell joined the Theology, Medicine, and Culture virtual seminar series in Spring 2023 to off this seminar, "'Many Are Called…' Medicine As Ministry to Poor and Marginalized Communities."

Jason Ashe, PhD, ThM, MDiv is a Community Health Psychologist & Research Scientist, whose work explores religion and racism as psychosocial determinants of health. He focuses specifically on cardiovascular disease and cerebrovascular disorder risk and health inequities among Black Americans. Dr. Ashe is a former Theology, Medicine, and Culture Fellow at Duke Divinity School, and joined us in Spring 2023 to offer this virtual seminar, "Racism Driver of Health Disparities, Outlier in Our Theology Of Illness."

In Auden’s poem “The Art of Healing,” he writes that “every sickness is a musical problem and every cure a musical solution.” Jazz and health care are two things we normally don’t think about together, let alone in the context of mental health. This conversation was recorded at the 2024 Practice & Presence gathering between theological ethicist Patrick Smith and physician and writer Brewer Eberly. They explores jazz and medicine as moral practice. How does jazz draw out metaphors that help us think about health care and clinical relationships differently? How does jazz teach us to lament and work with uncertainty? As we consider the hard things we have been made to see and hear in health care, how might jazz—a form of art born of oppression and pain—disrupt complacency and awaken us to new ways to live and to heal and to sing?