The first annual symposium on belief and non-belief in modern American culture was held at the Copley Theater Tuesday night. The symposium featured lectures by two prominent physicians on the role of faith in medicine and how religion intervenes in the making of medical decisions.
Dr. Jerome Groopman and Dr. Sherwin Nuland were the featured speakers of the event, which was jointly sponsored by Atlantic Monthly and Boston College and broadcast live from downtown Boston to a group of students watching on campus.
The talk was moderated by Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, editor of Commonweal, an independent biweekly journal published by Catholic lay-people. University President William J. Leahy, SJ presented opening remarks.
With his book, The Measure of Our Days: A Spiritual Exploration of Illness, Groopman inspired and advises the ABC TV Series Gideon’s Crossing. Groopman is also professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and chief of experimental medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Nuland, clinical professor of surgery at Yale School of Medicine, authored How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, winner of the National Book Award and a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 1995.
Groopman began the dialogue with a story of a young boy who survived leukemia, only to die of AIDS contracted through a blood transfusion.
“The boy’s father believed that doctors were extensions of God’s arms, and that we had failed,” Groopman said. “The boy’s father felt the best way to help his son lied in the church, and through the nature and words of the church,” he added.
Groopman commented on his difficulty reconciling faith with medicine.
“I had no answer. I had no way of rationalizing, as a believing person,” Groopman said.
“Ultimately, there will come a time when our bodies cannot be healed, and in medicine we need to recognize this at times. But the soul can always be healed,” he said.
Nuland also presented his views and experiences of religion and its involvement in medicine.
“The human spirit does not arise out of celestial powers but biological need,” Nuland said. According to Nulan, wonder unites both belief in the divine and biology.
Nulan commented, however, that he finds meaning for human life not in religion, but in appreciation of the aesthetic.
“I’ve never been able to convince myself that life has inherent meaning. We create meaning,” Nuland said. “Meaning for us, as human beings, is to be found in the aesthetic, in beauty and love. Love is the ultimate source of meaning in our lives, whether it be love of God or love of others.”
The epitome of this love of others, for Nuland, is Thornton Wilder’s book, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, where all are somehow united by love.
As an example of his reliance on biology, Nuland told of 72-year-old Orthodox Jewish woman whom he treated for heart failure on the eve of Yom Kippur.
“The woman had only twelve to sixteen hours to live. I filled a syringe with four- times the required dose of morphine and ended her life,” Nuland said. Nuland stated that his non-believing outlook dominated in this case.
Additionally, the two physicians commented on the elevated status doctors have in society.
“One of the draws into medicine is specifically that God-like status,” Nuland said. “But physicians require constant affirmation. I have never lost a patient without ever thinking it wasn’t my fault,” he added.
Groopman also commented on the status of physicians.“There’s this idea that as a physician, you move God out of the way and worship yourself.”
The issue of prayer for the ill arose during the question and answer period following the physicians’ lectures, and Groopman expressed his reluctance to believe in group prayer.
“I’m extremely skeptical of group prayer, of a group of people praying for someone that doesn’t know he or she is being prayed for,” he said.
According to Groopman, the function of prayer is to focus the mind.
Nuland expressed his disagreement with pragmatic prayer, with “people praying in a foxhole while they’re being shot at,” he said. “To ask for individual intervention is a mockery,” Nuland added.
The symposium was modeled on a series of public dialogues established by Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, SJ of Milan. This year’s symposium in Boston was the first in what is to be an annual function examining faith in various aspects of American society.
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