Dr. Kinghorn is a psychiatrist whose work centers on the role of religious communities in caring for persons with mental health problems and on ways in which Christians engage practices of modern health care. Jointly appointed within Duke Divinity School and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of Duke University Medical Center, he is co-director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative and is a staff psychiatrist at the Durham VA Medical Center. He has written on the moral and theological dimensions of combat trauma and moral injury, on the moral and political context of psychiatric diagnosis, and on the way that St. Thomas Aquinas’ image of the human as wayfarer might inform contemporary practices of ministry and mental health care.
Recent Books
In the Media
Kinghorn on the need for Christians to think and act differently about suicide
Warren Kinghorn on reframing our understanding of mental health care in Christian contexts
News and Stories
The Limits of Burnout and the Work of Health Care
In this essay, TMC co-director Warren Kinghorn critiques the language of “burnout,” arguing that it reflects a mechanistic view of clinicians shaped by systems of efficiency and productivity. Drawing on Aquinas, he instead commends a recovery of the contemplative life as essential for sustaining the work of health care and reorienting it toward love, wonder, and the pursuit of the good.
Do Not Harm Yourself, for We Are All Here
Paul’s cry to the Philippian jailer is a model for the church to respond to suicide in an America plagued by deaths of despair.
Loneliness Is Killing Us
The Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School in partnership with John Swinton and the University of Aberdeen in Scotland hosted a gathering, “Beyond Symptoms: Mental Health and the Crisis of Disconnection."