The 2021 Conference
The medicine we know today has a history, and that history sets the terms for what we expect medicine to become in the future. What are the historical sources of contemporary medicine? What has been lost that should be recovered? What should be left behind? In particular, what do we know about the Hippocratic tradition? How has that tradition been taken up, modified, and developed in Jewish, Christian and Muslim cultures? What resources, if any, does that tradition offer to practitioners today? What aspects of the medicine of the past should ground the medicine of the future?
The 2021 Conference on Medicine and Religion invites clinicians, scholars, clergy, students and others to take up these and other questions related to the intersection of medicine and religion. In light of the seismic events of 2020, we also encourage submissions that address either the COVID-19 pandemic or racial inequities in health and health care. We encourage participants to address these questions and issues in light of religious traditions and practices, particularly, though not exclusively, those of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The conference is a forum for exchanging ideas from an array of disciplinary perspectives, from accounts of clinical practices to empirical research to scholarship in the humanities.
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About Us
The annual Conference on Medicine and Religion is a leading forum for discourse and scholarship at the intersection of medicine and religion. It exists to enable health professionals and scholars to gain a deeper and more practical understanding of how religion relates to the practice of medicine, with particular attention to the traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The forum is intended in a spirit that builds bridges between theory and practice, science and theology, the academy and lay communities, the various health professions, and the Abrahamic religious traditions.
Each year, the conference is organized by its advisory board of clinicians and scholars who work at the intersection of medicine and religion. Each conference features both keynote speakers and peer-reviewed paper sessions, panels, workshops and posters. The inaugural conference, held in Chicago, May 23-25, 2012, was entitled "Responding to the Call of the Sick: Religious Traditions and Health Professions Today". Subsequent conferences were as follows: "What Does It Mean to Care?", (Chicago) 2013; "Responding to the Limits and Possibilities of the Body", (Chicago) 2014; "Spiritual Dimensions of Illness and Health", (Boston) 2015; "Approaching the Sacred: Science, Health and Practices of Care", (Houston) 2016; "Re-Enchanting Medicine", (Houston) 2017; "Examining the Foundations of Medicine and Religion", (St. Louis) 2018; and "My Pain is Always With Me", (Duke) 2019.