Mobilizing Religious Progressives on Health Care
The President is reaching out to faith leaders to help reframe the health care debates in moral terms, and religious progressives are heeding the call(s).
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Does Prayer Work? Do Prayer Studies Work?
Can the efficacy of prayer be determined through a double-blind clinical trial? Do studies measure prayer in ways that even make sense? Perhaps we’re learning more about medical science than about the healing power of prayer.
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Listening and Supporting: The Spirituality of Nurses
A Massachusetts nurse loses her job after talking to a dying patient about religion. What does this case reveal about the place of sprituality in American hospitals?
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Bearing Witness: The Work of Hospital Chaplains
Hospital chaplains provide spiritual care to the sick and dying, and they tend to both patients and their families. While their voices are not often heard in the larger conversation about religion and medicine, this is slowly changing.
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When Medicine and Religion Conflict Around Children: The Case of Daniel Hauser
When Daniel Hauser and his mother, members of new Native American religion the Nemenhah Band, opted out of chemotherapy and fled to Mexico, the media were ready with a religion vs. medicine narrative.
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Physicians, “Conscience,” and the Denial of Options
New federal regulations, enacted by the lame-duck Bush administration, privilege the religious or moral scruples of physicians over a patient’s right to treatment. 40 million Americans have physicians who will not present them with all the options for treatment.
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Please Bless His Eyes: Praying At The Hospital
There’s a surprising quality to the prayers left at the feet of a statue of Jesus at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital; they’re not simple petitions or requests for an all-powerful God to fix their problems—they are snippets of ongoing conversations.
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