current research and writing
selected works in process
Healthy and Sick Life
Attentive to experiences of bodily life in sickness and in health, and orienting the excellences, or habits, that might enable a realistic philosophy and practice of medicine, this book offers a study of physicians and patients who confront health in sickness and who (ought to) correspond creatively, while giving shape to the respective vocations of physicianship and patienthood. Put differently, as a hermeneutic and phenomenological examination, and as a study in the philosophy and practice of medicine, Healthy and Sick Life concentrates on the life of sickly bodies caught up into communities of caring strangers—who are their healthy and sickly bodies too—in order to understand corporeality, communality, and the art of medicine.
Being Disrupted (with Jordan Mason and Andy Michel)
In the tradition of Hippocrates, physicians are obligated to oppose harm, whether by acting or refraining from acting. Yet in the unpredictable world of medicine only some harms are avoidable, while others are not . To reconcile the discrepancies between their duty to oppose harm and the reality that their actions risk harm, it is common for physicians to engage in abstracted cost-benefit analyses as moral justification. But abstraction does not do justice to the actualities of harm, which are experienced, ontologically, as disruptions to and transformations of one’s being. Physicians must learn to attend to and recognize such harms experienced by their patients and themselves too. We argue that reckoning with and confessing such inevitable harms, revealed by ontological disruptions and transformations, opens physicians’ gaze to the truth and beauty of becoming different through experiences of illness, healing, or becoming.
Refusing Clinical Ethics as Medical Humanities (with Jordan Mason)
In recent years scholars and practitioners of medicine have responded to growing burnout and dissatisfaction by suggesting medical humanities programming as a fix. The scales have tipped too far in the direction of efficient control of bodies, the thinking goes, and need now be balanced instrumentally by endeavors that reflect human values to bring us back into harmony. But not all is well with this narrative. Some years ago now, Jeffrey P. Bishop proposed that the medical humanities simply appeal to the same metaphysical assumptions operating in modern medicine, and therefore perpetuate its focus on efficient control. Extending Bishop’s critique of medical humanities’ utilitarian function, in this article we argue that clinical ethics too is being subsumed under its utilitarian project, becoming what we call ethics-as-humanities. In forgetting its distinctive role as phronesis, practical wisdom, guiding the practice of medicine in particular circumstances, ethics-as-humanities risks becoming—like narrative medicine and other medical humanities remediation projects—something that merely serves the making of ‘docile’ clinicians and clinical ethicists. We call for clinical ethicists to engage the painful work of becoming aware of our complicity with the deformational institutional setting of healthcare, and in turn, reclaim an ethics understood as the struggle to interpret, understand, and decide rightly. That is to say, ethics that is nurtured by hermeneutics and phronesis, rather than reduced to mere instrumental program or schema. Where we find we have become docile bodies training up other docile bodies, ethics-as-struggle might open our imagination subsequently to (re)discover the moral life differently.
publications
and scholarly efforts
About
I am a Canadian (born and raised in Estevan, Saskatchewan) whose scholarly work tends to be found at the intersections of theology, philosophy, and medicine/health care. At present, I am the Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics and McDonald Scholar in the Columbia Center for Clinical Medical Ethics (CCME) at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons. I am also the Director of the Columbia Character Cooperatives, an initiative of the CCME that gathers student Fellows to think about and to (re)discover the practices that (fail to) make them as good as possible for their tasks as healthcare workers, whether as doctors, surgeons, or the like. In addition to my work at Columbia, I am concurrently a Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, a Research Associate at Vancouver School of Theology, and a Fellow with the James M Houston Centre for Humanity & the Common Good at Regent College.
Previously, I was the McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in Christian Ethics and Public Life with the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life at the University of Oxford. I was also a humanities and healthcare fellow with a Wellcome Trust ISSF funded project, 'Advancing medical professionalism: integrating humanities teaching in the University of Oxford's medical school'. In addition to these recent roles, my academic background includes training in theology, bioethics and health policy, and applied physiology.
I owe a great deal to those scholars who've invested their time and energy into my academic formation, including Professors John C McDowell, Terry Lovat, Archie Spencer, Cad Dennehy, Carole Schneider (1950-2013), and Douglas Miller.
