March 4-6, 2016, Houston, TX
Approaching the Sacred: Science, Health and Practices of Care
Contemporary medicine sees itself as fundamentally scientific—grounded in the best available evidence from the scientific disciplines. Those disciplines—including psychology, neuroscience, genomics, and epidemiology—both build on and inform particular accounts of human health and wellbeing. This conference considers how these “scientific” accounts relate to underlying normative views of human health, whether secular or religious, and in particular to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
How should practices of caring and healing within particular religious communities and traditions be influenced by contemporary scientific discoveries? What are exemplars of faithfully using scientific insights for the benefit of human health? What distinctive contributions can different religious traditions bring to the moral and societal challenges brought about by new scientific discoveries?
The 2016 Conference on Medicine and Religion invites 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 and accounts 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, and Islam or other world religions.