Attempting a summary of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Fellowship feels like attempting a summary of words like “vocation” and “friendship.” What can be said? The TMC Fellowship brought the most healing and stimulating year of my life – a year of discerning vocation, rich learning, and hope. Hopkins said that “Christ plays in ten-thousand places.” If your experiences are similar to mine, medicine often brings too much noise to hear such notes, and too much blindness to see such places. The TMC began to renew my sight and gave me ears to hear. It healed my cynicism but protected against easy optimism. It opened my eyes to both the profoundly difficult and complex within bioethics and theology as well as the beautiful and good within medicine, the church, and culture. The academic quality of the program was only superseded by the depth of friendship, mentorship, and community. Even as I am months away from the fellowship, back in medical school, I’m writing papers with friends I made in the TMC and praying using practices and habits I learned there. I’ve experienced rest in vocational discernment. Ultimately, I now see medicine as a place of wild and demanding hope where Christ, indeed, plays.
-John Brewer Eberly, TMC Fellow 2016-17, University of South Carolina School of Medicine, Class of 2018
Combining formal academic study with spiritual formation, mentorship, weekly seminars, church and community-based practicums, and semi-annual retreats, the Fellowship in Theology, Medicine, & Culture equips participants to wisely and faithfully engage their vocations with respect to health and medicine.