Welcome to the Program on Medicine and Religion

The Program on Medicine and Religion at the University of Chicago is a leading forum for scholarship, discourse and education at the intersection of medicine and religion. The aims of this Program are to discover what shape contemporary medicine might take in different faith contexts, to foster interfaith dialogue about medicine and religion, and to encourage and advise those patients, practitioners, and communities that are currently seeking to re-invigorate the spiritual and religious dimensions of health care. If successful, this work will help patients to make medical choices that are better informed by their own (and others’) religious traditions, and help them to interpret their medical experiences in the light of spirituality and faith. This work will help health care professionals to re-imagine and re-engage medicine as a faithful practice—to experience their work as intrinsically rewarding and fulfilling. This work will also help to clarify how health care systems can better accommodate the particular needs of diverse religious communities.

The Program pursues these above aims through scholarship, training, and education. The Program promotes scholarship regarding all aspects of the intersection of medicine and religion, from the clinical encounter between patients and clinicians to broader societal and policy concerns. While open to all the diverse religious and spiritual traditions that can inform medicine, the Program primarily promotes scholarship and education related to the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The point of this focus is not to be exclusionary, but to facilitate a more robust interfaith dialogue among these traditions that share so much in common, and to pursue a greater depth of scholarship than might be possible were the Program to attempt to embrace all the world’s many faith traditions equally. The Program also seeks to train and educate those who will expand the range and depth of this field, to develop educational resources through conferences, workshops/seminars and formal coursework, and to create venues that bring together academics and laypersons, scientists and scholars of religion, health care professionals and members of the public, to consider what medicine might look like were it to be fully informed by attention to its religious and spiritual dimensions.

The Program originated as a collaborative effort involving the Department of Medicine and the Divinity School. The Program was launched January 2009 by cofounders and former UChicago faculty, Dr. Farr Curlin (Duke University) and Dr. Daniel Sulmasy (Georgetown University) and was previously led by Dr. Aasim Padela (Medical College of Wisconsin). The Program on Medicine and Religion at the University of Chicago is a sponsoring institution for the annual National Conference on Medicine and Religion. Today this Program is being currently led by Dr. John Yoon, and has benefited from grant support by the John Templeton Foundation, the Hyde Park Institute, and a generous legacy gift from Dr. and Mrs. Hugh Hazenfield.

To learn more about the Program on Medicine and Religion, access our 2023 Annual Report.

Upcoming Events

Non-Credit Course | Science and Religion: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives (Lumen Christi Institute)

New Spring Quarter 2025 Course

CCTS 32000
Religion, Medicine, and Human Flourishing on the South Side of Chicago: Reimagining the Role of the University Through Community Voices

Spring 2025 (100 units), University of Chicago
Date/Time: TBD
Enrollment (grad and undergrad): 15 total

Instructors:
John Yoon, MD (Department of Medicine, Director of the Program on Medicine and Religion)
Course Director Email: jdyoon@uchicago.edu

Course Description: Modern medicine historically promotes health as central to the good life. The contemporary turn in the medical and social sciences to the more capacious concept of human flourishing, however, presses these disciplines into conversation with longer traditions of inquiry on the nature of the good life for individuals and within community. How might philosophical, cultural, and religious traditions reveal the powers and limits of contemporary views of human flourishing? How does the on-the-ground experience of those pushing to advance human flourishing on the south side of Chicago challenge these categories? Sponsored by the Program on Medicine and Religion, this course is an innovative experiential course open to pre-health undergraduates in the College, graduate students in Public Policy/Social Work/Divinity School, and/or medical students at Pritzker School of Medicine. This course seeks to expose students to traditional and contemporary perspectives of health and human flourishing, while offering opportunities to engage local faith-based non-profit organizations that seek to promote human flourishing among underserved communities in the South Side of Chicago.

Learning Objectives: By the end of the course, students will be able to:

1. Discuss empirical, conceptual, and pedagogical intricacies of whether and how to apply frameworks of flourishing in community health promotion and addressing social determinants of health.
2. Explore traditional and contemporary dimensions of flourishing with particular emphasis on philosophical, psychological, cultural, and religious perspectives.
3. Explore the implications of the prior insights for pedagogical strategies and what these strategies reveal about the possibilities and limits of promoting flourishing in the South Side of Chicago specifically through one’s role as a health care professional.

Format: Seminar, field education