Category: Health
Friendship Through a Pandemic: Seeing More Clearly With Stanley Hauerwas
Ephraim Radner and others have recently reflected that the church’s theologians have said shockingly little about the pandemic that’s really been helpful, that’s helped Christians think clearly about this global crisis. To get our heads straight, minds clear, and hearts...
More Than Lip Service: Reviewing Two Books on Holistic Healing
When I started reading Amy Julia Becker’s new book To Be Made Well and Liuan Huska’s Hurting Yet Whole,[1] I was gripped instantly by the opening anecdotes. I had something of a reputation during my Family Medicine residency for attracting...
Trauma, Attachment, and Self-Care: What Everyone Should Know
Trauma. Once a word that solely referred to a physical wound, it is now far more popularly discussed with regards to psychological wounds. One can read dozens of books about trauma and find countless memes floating around discussing it, but...
Public Health After Christendom
How are we to consider public health when the health of the public officials themselves would not be recognizable to prior generations? Are we to simply stick our heads in the sand pretending that everything is normal? The CDC has...
Portraits of Anxiety in Dostoevsky and Dickens
E.M. Forster wrote, “it is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source.” In Aspects of the Novel, Forester explains that while it is the work of the historian to deal with the external details...
A Legacy of Letters: Living and Dying Well in the Lives of My Great-Grandparents
A tiny Bella, wearing a striped sweater and a mostly toothless grin. My parents, glowingly happy with their new baby. My three great-grandparents, seemingly ageless.
Purity Culture
So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood.” (Matthew 27:24) Our contemporary culture has...
That Others May Live: Fetal Cell Lines and Vaccine Production
The world breathed a collective sigh of relief at news that multiple vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 were found to be effective. No sooner had this news reached us before there was a moral greaseball gumming up...
The Ethics of Healthcare Rationing
The call comes in the middle of my clinic session at the hospital in rural Kenya where I work. I apologize to the patient in front of me and answer my phone. It’s the emergency department at the hospital in...
The Perpetual Motion Machine and the Pandemic
My grandmother is eighty-five years old. She will die someday. I want her to die well and, in the meantime, to live well. She lives with my aunt about ten minutes from where I live with my wife and four...