"Humanizing Medicine: How a Religious Understanding of
Human Personhood Can Revitalize Medicine"
Free Public Lecture and Panel Discussion
Featuring Todd Best
Thursday, April 7, 2005, 7:00 p.m.
Lester R. Bryant Auditorium
(University Hospital, MU School of Medicine)
Any experience that requires us, as humans, to
deal with others, as humans, requires us to formulate an adequate understanding
of what it means to be human. Increasingly over the past couple centuries,
much of higher education and particularly medical education has taken a
view of human personhood that is based on assumptions which are not well
founded philosophically and which do not end up serving well the needs
of the clinician, patient, or student. Taking a fresh look at a religious
view of human personhood may help us to re-invigorate how we view our patients,
our students, our colleagues, and ourselves, especially as we seek to understand
the growing complexity, wonder, and mystery of illness and healing, life
and death in the human experience. Todd Best, M.A., is Program Administrator at the Christian Study Center
of Gainesville, an independent educational center that works alongside
the University of Florida in exploring the intellectual resources of the
Christian tradition for responding to the enduring questions of human experience
and the challenges that emerge from contemporary cultural change. He has
an M.A. in religious studies from the University of Florida, where his
research focused on philosophy of religion and educational philosophy.
Much of his work revolves around how Christian thought intersects the various
disciplines in the academy. Other areas of interest include social ethics,
moral philosophy, and post-modern interpretation theories.
This lecture, organized by the MU School of
Medicine, is funded by a grant from The George Washington Institute for
Spirituality and Health. |