Religion, Capital, and the Struggles of Moral Formation in Healthcare
Greed and profit increasingly constitute reigning ways of being and valuing in US healthcare. Within the flows and structures of capital in the US, immoderate financial self-interest too often prevails in every sector. From pharmaceutical marketing and pricing to the profit incentives of insurers and hospitals, research bias, and the overuse of tests and treatments, mammon—the worship of wealth—is pervasive. In ways big and small, it is undermining healthcare’s ancient covenants and oaths, its sense of mystery and ‘holy’ awe, and the dignity of the other. Has capitalism become ‘the religion of modernity’ in healthcare, instituting its own rituals and myths, practices and formations, and discourses of truth? Does the pervasiveness of its ‘rationality’ in healthcare constitute an injustice? What has it meant for the moral formations and deformations of clinicians and trainees? Indeed, how does one struggle to be a ‘good’ healthcare professional, to do right, and to flourish within the hidden curricula of this rationality, or more broadly? What wisdom and distinctive ways of being, seeing, speaking, and accompanying do the communities, institutions, discourses, and practices of the world’s religions offer? Or have they too become co-opted by the same commodifying forces in society?
The 2027 Conference on Medicine and Religion invites clinicians, scholars, clergy, students and others to take up these and other questions at the intersection of medicine and religion. 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 various disciplinary perspectives, from accounts of clinical practices to empirical research to scholarship in the humanities.
