The Theology, Medicine, and Culture (TMC) initiative at Duke Divinity School has announced the creation of a new fellowship program. Through special grant support, the Fellowship in Theology, Medicine, and Culture will offer students tuition grants of at least 50 percent for the first year of study with additional scholarship support available on a competitive basis.
The goal of the fellowship is to equip Christians to faithfully engage their vocations in health care. The program is open to students and practitioners in health professions and others with full-time vocations in the health care field. The program will combine formal academic study with structured mentorship, retreats and seminars, and church and community-based practica.
“American medicine is in moral and spiritual turmoil,” said Farr Curlin, Josiah C. Trent Professor of Medical Humanities. “Many practitioners uncritically relegate their faith to the ‘personal’ sphere and are distressed as their professional practice becomes increasingly disconnected from their original sense of calling and vocation. The Initiative on Theology, Medicine, and Culture, and the fellowship program in particular, is built on our unique strengths and capacities at the Divinity School and the university to respond to these issues.”
Fellowship programming will also include gatherings with faculty, medical and divinity students, and others interested in the intersection of theology and medicine.
Said Warren Kinghorn, co-director of the TMC Initiative, “A great strength of the fellowship is that it brings together health practitioners and ministerial students in a context that is directly and deeply responsive to the realities of contemporary health care, while inviting these students into greater depth in the Christian tradition. Fellows will experience themselves not only as students learning about theology but also as participants in a community of theological formation and practice with respect to health and medicine.”