Social Medicine in Bioethics: Culture, Religion, and Meaning

BETH 738 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

This interdisciplinary seminar examines how religious traditions, cultural worlds, and spiritual practices shape ethical reflection and decision-making in health care. Drawing on theology, anthropology, and social medicine, the course explores how theological positions and diverse religious communities have contributed to the development of bioethics while also situating those contributions within global histories of health, illness, and care. Students will consider key principles from religious and spiritual ethics and how they guide clinical decisions about suffering, healing, personhood, community, and justice. 

Building on the foundations of social medicine, the course uses insights from the interpretive social sciences to analyze how colonialism, racism, neoliberalism, caregiving arrangements, and environmental conditions structure experiences of illness and access to care in different cultural and religious settings across Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and North America. Through historical and contemporary case studies, we will ask how religious and spiritual perspectives both respond to and are shaped by these forces, and how they can be brought into dialogue with bioethics and social medicine to alleviate suffering and advance equity.

Class sessions will combine short lectures, close reading, discussion, and student-led presentations. By the end of the course students will be able to critically assess the role of religion, culture, and spirituality in bioethical debates; articulate how anthropological and social medicine approaches reframe familiar clinical dilemmas; and propose more context-sensitive, justice-oriented responses to ethical challenges in health care.