Mercy College Welcomes Four National Experts for Inaugural Faith & Healing Speaker Series
Mercy College of Health Sciences (Mercy College) will host four national speakers during the 2014-15 academic year as part of a new Faith & Healing Speaker Series to address these important topics, promote discussion with members of the healthcare, health policy and wellness communities in Iowa, and instill a love for learning.
The Series will encompass the topics of faith, healing, and wellness from different perspectives while highlighting Catholic theology and practice. Despite strong evidence that religious faith, regardless of faith tradition, often informs clinicians’ practices and that many patients’ experiences of illness are mediated by faith, the relationship between faith and healing is understudied. Organizers hope that the dialogue produced by this series helps to fill this gap about the critical issues related to these topics.
The Series is also intended to address one of the institutions core values: knowledge; which has been defined as “instilling in our College Community a thirst to continually study, investigate, observe, and experience the world all-around for facts and ideas that can improve the health and well-being of humankind and create a love for learning.”
The first speaker will be Dr. Thomas Mans, Vice President of Academic Support and Research for the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU) in Washington, DC., whose topic will be “The Intellectual Tradition of Catholicism: Healing Minds, Healing Culture” at 6 p.m. on Thursday, November 20, 2014 in the Wellmark Room in the Sullivan Center on the campus of Mercy College, 928 6th Avenue.
The remaining speakers in the series will include Marianne Comfort, Education Coordinator for Justice Team for the Sisters of Mercy of Mercy of the Americas in Silver Springs, Maryland, whose topic will be “Understanding the Critical Concerns of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas” on Thursday, January 22, 2015 at 6 p.m.
On Wednesday, March 4, 2015, Jeffrey Bishop, MD, PhD, Director of the Albert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics and Tenet Chair of Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University will speak at 6 p.m. on the topic “Medicine, power, and the care of the dying”.
The final speaker for the first year of the program will be Tobias Winwright, PhD, Hubert Mäder Endowed Chair in Health Care Ethics at Saint Louis University and Associate Professor of Theological Ethics in the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University, who will speak on Thursday, June 25, 2015 at 6 p.m. on the topic “Practicing Patients: Revisiting the Patient as Person”.
The Mercy College Faith & Healing Speaker Series lectures and group discussions are free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served prior to the start of each session. Advanced registration is requested and can be completed by visiting the Mercy College website at mchs.edu/faithandhealing. The website also has more information on each speaker and directions and parking information.
Mercy College is the only Catholic college in Greater Des Moines and is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission (HLC). To learn more about all of our health science academic programs, visit mchs.edu/academics.
About Mercy College of Health Sciences
Mercy College has been preparing health care providers for more than 100 years. Mercy College is the only Catholic college in central Iowa and is accredited by The Higher Learning Commission (HLC). Watch how Mercy College students share their experiences by visiting mchs.edu/About-Us/College-News/Student-Stories. To learn more about health science academic programs, visit mchs.edu/academics.