Elaine Howard Ecklund, Ph.D
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On Friday, December 3, 2010 at Rice University's Baker Institute, Assistant Sociology Professor Elaine Howard Ecklund will inaugurate the first event of the Religion and Public Life Program, which is housed in Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research. The event, entitled "Faith in the Corridors of Medicine," will bring leading scholars in the areas of religion and health to campus to exchange ideas about the role of religion in medicine. The panel discussion will examine how hospitals, patients, and health professionals are affected by religion and spirituality. Relevant to patients and health practitioners alike, the role of a patient’s spiritual and religious beliefs directly affects how the patient copes with disease, medical decision-making, and other health-related processes.
“One of the main goals of the Religion and Public Life Program,” Ecklund says, “is to bring some of the best scholarship on religion into the purview of the public. This event will feature two scholars who are doing very important work in religion and medicine, and they are exactly the kind of scholars whose work we hope to continue to expose to a broader public that is directly affected by new research.”
The panel includes Wendy Cadge, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University, who is currently working on her upcoming book Paging God: Religion in the Halls of Medicine. Her work examines formal and informal religious and spiritual activities in hospitals. Stemming from over a hundred interviews with physicians, social workers, nurses, and other health professionals, Cadge looks at the action and reaction to religious and spiritual practices in hospitals. Cadge argues that religion and spirituality are present everywhere from the hospital meditation rooms to the intensive care units.The event also features Farr A. Curlin, an Assistant Professor of Medicine and Associate Faculty Member at the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago. He specializes in clinical medical ethics, doctor-patient interactions, hospice and palliative care, and religion, spirituality and the practice of medicine. Curlin studies morality in medicine by scrutinizing the discussion of morality in medical school curriculum and in practitioner-patient exchanges. By employing qualitative interviews and cross-sectional surveys, Curlin's work inspects the way a physician's clinical practices are affected by his religious affiliation. He recently published a national study looking at a physician's religious practice in a medical context.
Rice University is strategically located to host conversations around the topic of religion and medicine. The university sits in the heart of the Texas Medical Center, a community that attracts professionals and patients from all over the world and is a global leader in innovative medical research and care. The topic of religion and medicine provides immediate fodder for conversation, relevant for practitioners, scholars, and lay people, all of whom have an interest in what takes place within the halls of hospitals.
By bringing in scholars from medicine and religion, the panel debate aims to explore the effects of religion on patients and practitioners. In the face of a changing economy and the erosion of public confidence in corporate responsibility, religious questions have entered the fore and are intertwined in nearly every aspect of our lives. The Religion and Public Life program seeks to translate important scholarly work about religion to relevant public audiences, bridging the gap between academia and policy.
Though the program has chosen to address the issues of religion and medicine in its inaugural event, there are several other program themes, such as race, immigration, and professions that the Religion and Public Life program will feature in coming years. In addition to these themes, the program also sponsors numerous initiatives such as a Books in Public Scholarship initiative, Reading Religion at Rice, and various grants and fellowship programs supporting pertinent issues to religion and public life. For more information about the Religion and Public Life program, please visit the program’s website www.kinder.rice.edu/rplp.
The two-hour inaugural event and panel discussion will begin this Friday at 6:30 p.m. in Baker Hall's Doré Commons and is free and open to the public. Please RSVP by fax to 713.348.5993, by e-mail to bipprsvp@rice.edu or on the Web at www.bakerinstitute.org/events/faithinmed.
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