This panel explores the frameworks—epistemological, linguistic, symbolic, anthropological, and moral—by which healing is variously understood and attempted. The first paper suggests that religion/spirituality is a symbolic and cultural process that transforms the primarily private suffering of illness into a public reality. This “transfiguration” enables accompaniment, shared meaning-making, and ultimately, healing. The second paper proposes the Christian theological concept of “kenosis” as moral counter to medicine’s focus on mastery and control. Kenosis reframes healing as relational presence rather than technical intervention. The next paper offers the heart-centered epistemologies of Islamic spiritual psychology and Traditional Chinese medicine as holistic counters to the cerebrocentrism of modern medicine. Doing so, they argue, can present a more comprehensive “science of the soul.” The final paper promotes the incorporation of components of Clinical Pastoral Education into the conventional training of healthcare professionals. Doing so can reform existing medical curricula and encourage more humanistic healing frameworks.
This paper proposes that healing — whether practiced by shamans, allopathic physicians, curanderos, priests, or therapists—achieves its greatest efficacy when illness is transformed, through metaphor and language into a manageable object placed in relation to an existing world of meaning, shared with others, and part of the culture, such as spirituality and religion. That is, a private to public transfiguration, as Arendt in The Human Condition (1958) and the author (hidden, 2026) have elaborated. Drawing from anthropologist Michael Jackson’s The Palm at the End of the Mind (2009) and Between One and One Another (2012), my paper argues that language functions not merely as communication but as world-constitution: private fears and questions are turned into direct objects of language, i.e. into culturally shared concepts that allow the person and society to confront disease and exert a measure of control over illness and suffering.
Modern medicine has often conceived of itself as a project of mastery over bodies, disease, and mortality. While medical humanities has challenged this expansion of technical and institutional authority, the moral and relational dimensions of healing remain difficult to articulate within prevailing clinical frameworks. This paper proposes the Christian theological concept of kenosis, i.e., altruistic self-abnegation, as an ethical framework for redescribing healthcare. Drawing on theological and medical humanities sources, it explores how a 'kenotic' medicine might resist reductive explanations of suffering, emphasize accompaniment over cure-based interventions, and challenge clinicians’ moral authority within the therapeutic relationship. Deployed appropriately, medical kenosis can bolster medical humanities by providing a theological resource for interrogating contemporary crises in healthcare. At the same time, it can recover the relational conditions necessary for healing, reimagining care as being-with and being-for the patient.
This research investigates the "sovereign" role of the heart within Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) and Islamic spiritual psychology, challenging the prevailing modern cerebrocentric paradigm of mental health. While TCM regards the heart as the seat of Shen (spirit), Islamic tradition identifies the Qalb as the moral and spiritual compass. Despite theological differences, both traditions emphasize the primacy of the heart over the brain in regulating emotions. By integrating these classical epistemologies with contemporary neurocardiology, this study highlights practical techniques such as the TCM five-element strategy and Islamic muhasabah that provide a holistic framework for emotional regulation. Incorporating these heart-centered perspectives into contemporary psychotherapy offers significant clinical benefits, advancing beyond the limitations of the conventional biopsychosocial model toward a more comprehensive "science of the soul".
In the vulnerable space of illness, the fickle and often ill-defined patient-physician relationship is an integral pillar of the healthcare experience. Recognizing that the spiritual care dimension of medical care and education has long been overlooked, Do Not Forget the Spirit explores how components of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), an interfaith professional education that trains hospital chaplains and ministers to care for people in crisis, are valuable and viable pedagogies for the education of physicians and other medical professionals. Drawing on autoethnographic experience as a chaplain intern, interviews with healthcare professionals, and emerging literature, this paper offers programmatic suggestions for integrating chaplain shadowing and CPE-style educational opportunities into existing medical curricula. Not only do these interventions have the potential to foster more cohesive interprofessional patient care, but they also encourage medical students to turn inward and contemplate the humanistic aspects of healing.