Practice & Presence: A Gathering for Christians in Health Care

Speaker: Alejandra Salemi PhD-c

Location: Langford 054

In this session, we will delve into the intricate relationship between religious beliefs and health behaviors, recognizing religion as a significant social determinant of health. Our workshop will kick off with a dynamic 15-minute presentation, offering insights into the multifaceted ways religious identities manifest within diverse populations. We will examine the influence of religiosity on health decision-making, spanning the realms of medicine, public health, and religious communities. This foundational discussion will equip healthcare providers, public health professionals, and religious leaders will aim to spark curiosity and give skills to enhance their understanding and approach to addressing religious influences on health. In this workshop, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Rather, our aim is to empower attendees with practical tools and insights to navigate the nuances of religion's impact on health in real-time scenarios.

Bio: Alejandra Salemi is a PhD student in the Population Health Sciences Department at Duke University, focusing on the intersection of public health and religion, in particular how religion is a social determinant of public health. She is a graduate of Harvard University, with a Master of Theological Studies with a concentration on religion, ethics and politics. She also earned a Bachelor’s and Master’s of Public Health from the University of Florida.

She is the creator and CEO of Healing Theology, a non-profit devoted to bridging the gaps between the worlds of religion and health. You can check out their platform on healingtheology.com. 

Alejandra is a candidate for ordination in the Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church and is a proud immigrant from Bogotá, Colombia. 

Speakers: Thomas Dalton, MD & Kimberly Dalton, RN

Location: Westbrook 0015

This workshop will include an overview of the Eden Village process for addressing both short-term and chronic homelessness with a focus on those clients living with severe mental illness. Eden Village is based upon the poverty care concept of True Charity as outlined by Marvin Olasky in The Tragedy of American Compassion to including: 1) Challenging the recipient 2) Personal relationships and 3) Religious or spiritual inclusion (CPR for the broken heart).

Bios: Tom Dalton, MD has been married to Kim Dalton, RN for 35 years. After completing medical school at Duke University paid by his wife's employment at Duke Hospital in the Electrophysiology Department, they embarked upon a long journey of international spiritual and medical poverty care with short term missions. In 2018, they had a mutual moment of clarity while serving in Kenya and decided to dedicate the remainder of their lives to serving the homeless in Wilmington, NC. They founded Eden Village of Wilmington, a remarkable faith-based tiny home model of community building for the chronically homeless offering health care through housing. There are now 12 Eden Villages in development across the United States.

Speaker: Mannes Matous, ThD-c

Location: Westbrook 0012

Recent advances in neuroscience suggest that we can solve the mental health crisis if we can master the brain. While this approach is thought to lessen the stigma around mental disorders, it reduces the human person to the brain. This workshop reflects on the strengths and the limitations in the turn to the brain, and it discusses what Christianity can bring to the conversation.

Bio: Mannes Matous is a Dominican friar and Catholic priest. He has a Masters in Neuroscience and is currently a ThD student at Duke Divinity.

Speakers: Reuben Zimmerman, PA & Art Wiser, MD

Location: Westbrook 0013

Shared faith and commitment to shared way of life in community brings daily encounters with addiction, trauma, affective disorder, existential suffering. Good psychiatric care includes family, work, education and community. Theology becomes lived experience and should inform everything we do in life and medicine. 

Participants in this workshop will discuss mental healthcare as practiced in a faith-based intentional Christian community. Our approach does not exclude good psychiatry and psychology, but inspired by the Gospels, points providers and patients towards Jesus, and others! 

Bios: Reuben Zimmerman has more than 30 years of experience practicing family medicine, obstetrics and mental healthcare at the Woodcrest Bruderhof in Rifton, NY.  He is a father and grandfather and writes for Plough Magazine on issues from end-of-life care and chronic pain to parenting and forgiveness. 

Arthur Wiser is a family medicine physician in a Bruderhof community in SW Penn. with an interest in pediatrics, community medicine, and flourishing. 

Speakers: Shainy Varghese, MD & Rev. Andrew Wolfe 

Location: Westbrook 0013

After Hurricane Harvey devastated the city of Houston in 2017, health practitioners and the church came together to address the deep iniquities exposed by the natural disaster. Compelled by a love of God, the love of neighbor, and call to serve the common good, a friendship was formed between the University of Houston's College of Nursing and St. Paul's UMC to create a community health clinic. This workshop would tell this story of strange friendships and lay the framework for how others can replicate and build off our model for healthcare delivery to under/uninsured populations.

Bios: Dr. Shainy Varghese (PhD, APRN, CPNP-PC, CGNC) is a teaching professor and director of the UH nursing clinic. She has a background in telemedicine and pediatric care.

Rev. Andrew Wolfe is pastor of congregational care at Chapelwood UMC (Houston) and helped found the UH nursing clinic.

Speakers: Brett McCarty, ThD, Lauren Barron, MD, Don Middleton, DO 

Location: Westbrook 0016

What if people in health care and faith communities were to come together and offer more holistic support for people struggling with substance use issues? In an effort to describe one such possibility, this workshop will serve as an introduction to Christian recovery programs based on the 12 step model of addiction recovery. This session will be a safe space for anyone wanting to know more about what happens “in the rooms.” You will come away with a better understanding of the history and contemporary landscape of 12 step programs, the spiritual principles engrained within the 12 steps, the logistics of meetings, the language of recovery, and how sponsorship works. We also will discuss some of the concerns and critiques of recovery programs and describe current alternatives.

Bios: Brett McCarty is a theological ethicist whose work centers on questions of faithful action within healthcare. He is associate director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative at Duke Divinity School, and he holds a joint appointment in the School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health Sciences. Professor McCarty is also a faculty fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics and a faculty associate of the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine. 

Dr. Lauren Barron is the Michael E. DeBakey Chair for Medical Humanities at Baylor University where she directs the Medical Humanities Program. She has been a family physician for 30 years. In her addition to her work at Baylor University, she is affiliated with Waco Family Medicine, a federally qualified health center serving 60,000 of the most vulnerable patients in McLennan County.

Don Middleton is a board-certified physician working for Meadows Behavioral Health in addiction medicine in Arizona. He serves on the board of directors of Crossroads Rehab, Inc., and has authored the book/workbook "The Dunamis Effect: When the Higher Power is Jesus". He serve his church as their medical mission's medical director, and is CEO/director of a non-profit encouraging churches to engage in addiction recovery ministry.

Speaker: Anjola Onadipe, MTS, MD-c

Location: Langford 060 

Narrative is the most common literary framework used to conceptualize the Bible and the clinical encounter; however, narrative has its limits. This workshop will discuss how a poetic imagination is edifying for interpreting Scripture and practicing medicine (e.g. through resisting excessive reductionism and promoting the development of wisdom amidst ambiguity).

Bio: Anjola Onadipe is an alumni of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Fellowship at Duke Divinity School (MTS, '24) and a fourth-year medical student at University of Michigan Medical School (UMMS) applying into Internal Medicine and Pediatrics.

Speaker: Caterina Baffa

Location: Langford 041 

In this workshop, we will analyze the structure of social media and the effects of its use, particularly among young people, through a Foucauldian lens to understand how power impacts online engagement. We will discuss what values and practices healthcare and ecclesial communities can employ to support young people navigating social media and its negative mental health impact. Workshop attendees will be invited to share their own understandings of the possible interplay between social media, power, and health as well as share their own resources for responding to these realities.

Bio: Caterina Baffa is a recent TMC alum and current first year doctoral student in the theology department at Boston College. She is studying theological ethics with a particular interest in contemporary Catholic bioethics.

Speakers: Martha Carlough, MD & Rebecca Martin, MD 

Location: Westbrook 0012 

This workshop will allow participants to explore and deepen their understanding of theology, holistic health, in and for the world, reflecting on the nature of God’s Shalom and the biblical vision of comprehensive justice, including Tzedakah (distributive justice) vs. Mizpah (reparative justice). It will include story-telling, practical applications and group discussion to allow exploration of participants’ own experiences, hopes and “fit” in this framework of global health, missions and justice.

Bios: Rebecca Martin is a Palliative Medicine physician and Clinical Associate Professor at New York Medical College, in Valhalla, NY. From 2013-2015, she served as a voluntary physician at United Mission Hospital in Tansen, Nepal. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Family Physicians, and board certified through the American Board of Family Medicine, having completed her medical education at New York Medical College, residency training at Lancaster General Hospital in Lancaster, PA, and a fellowship in Faculty Development & Medical Humanities at Georgetown University School of Medicine. Her specialty training in Palliative Medicine was completed in 2022 through an innovative, ACGME-approved, competency-based mid-career fellowship model at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

Martha Carlough is a family physician and Ignatian trained spiritual director with a 30 year history of work in global health, including almost a decade in Nepal and 20 years of work in maternal and child health and global health education through UNC-Chapel Hill. She is now Consulting Faculty at Duke Divinity School and Director of Spiritual Formation for the TMC initiative as well as working part-time as a physician at Samaritan Health Center in Durham. 

Speakers: Micah Rojo, RN & Jackson McNeese

Location: Langford 054 

This workshop gives an interactive history of nursing ethics from Nightingale to our present day. In this history we find a strong and coherent nursing ethics being lost as nurses attempt to adjust to and establish themselves in contemporary bioethics. We will invite participants to consider practical implications in their own contexts while also sharing constructive possibilities for how to act faithfully today. Rather than engaging in the traditional discourse of why nurses need bioethics, we hope to move to a posture of why bioethics need nurses.

Bios: Micah Rojo is a nurse and member of the ethics consult service at Duke University Hospital. He is getting his Masters of Theological Studies at Duke Divinity where he is also a Theology Medicine and Culture Fellow. Additionally, Micah is a Trent Center Clinical Ethics Fellow.

Jackson McNeece is a first year Ph.D. student at Baylor University. He is also an alumnus of Duke Divinity School as well as the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Fellowship. 

Speakers: William Buxton, MD & Verna Porter Buxton, MD

Location: Westbrook 0013 

Those facing a diagnosis of Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia and those caring for a loved one facing such challenges both experience significant emotional and existential distress. We have developed and implemented a support group for individuals experiencing dementia, as well as for their caregivers. In our rationality- and productivity- focused society, loss of one's cognitive abilities can lead to significant loss of sense of self and meaning. Relying on Scripture and the writings of such authors as Warren Kinghorn and John Swinton, we seek to equip participants to support one another as they find that our sense of purpose and identity are rooted and grounded in the imago Dei and that we can continue to have positive impact as we face a "new normal" and changes in our abilities.

Bios: William Buxton and Verna Porter Buxton are neurologists at the Providence Pacific Brain Health Center and have both completed the Certificate in Theology and Healthcare at Duke Divinity School. Bill is now a student in the hybrid Master of Divinity program at Duke. They are married with three adult sons and have worked together in practice since completing training.

Speakers: Andrea Clements, PhD & Tanner Clements

Location: Westbrook 0014

This workshop will cover how intentionally increasing interpersonal connection for patients, their healthcare practitioners, or anyone can facilitate health and flourishing. We will present a multidisciplinary look at the need for interpersonal connection from biblical, psychological, and neurobiological perspectives showing how a lack of connection may drive mental health struggles. We will explore practical ways to facilitate connection.

Bios: Dr. Andrea Clements (Andi) is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at East Tennessee State University and Associate Director of Research Design and Implementation at the ETSU Ballad Health Strong BRAIN Institute. She is also President and co-founder of Uplift Appalachia, a nonprofit focused on equipping churches to provide intensive connection, and physical, psychological, and spiritual support for people who live with addictions, mental health challenges, or other life struggles. She is well-known researcher who has developed, delivered, and studied trainings for varied audiences around trauma-responsiveness, ACEs science, and resilience-building. She regularly mentors people who live with addictions and those who have been or currently are incarcerated.

For eight years Tanner Clements was a bi-vocational pastor and elder in a low income, high need area of Johnson City, Tennessee. He co-founded Uplift Appalachia in 2018, and served as the executive director for three years. He publishes and speaks publicly about the need to build community to address addiction. He holds a MDiv in Theological Studies from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary and a BA from East Tennessee State University in digital media. He spent eight years as video services manager at a large regional university in which he is able to tell stories through film and spent the previous seven years as web developer. In July 2023, he left the university to pursue freelance video work and devoted himself more fully to Uplift Appalachia's mission.

Speakers: Zane Lapinskes, MD, Ben Fischer, MD & Brewer Eberly, MD 

Location: Westbrook 0014

This workshop will focus on how to practically implement the values we stand for as Christian physicians and nurses in our everyday work. At our clinic we have reclaimed and redeemed our work by departing from the corporate and governmental entities that govern and diminish primary care. We will discuss how we did that through Direct Primary Care and we'll get into the nuts and bolts of what that is.

Bios: Dr. Ben Fischer is a general internist with 20 years of practice experience, the last 8 of which have been in running a direct primary care practice. He is Board Certified by the American Board of Internal Medicine, specializing in the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of adult diseases. The Fischer Clinic practice has grown to 3 physicians, including partner Dr. Lapinskes and Dr. Eberly. 

Dr. Zane Lapinskes is certified by the American Board of Family Practice. Dr. Lapinskes joined Fischer Clinic in January 2018.  He enjoys taking care of both children and adults. He is a member of the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Christian Medical and Dental Society and the Christian Community Health Fellowship.

Dr. Brewer Eberly is a third-generation Board Certified Family Medicine physician who practices in the personal way that he saw lived out by his father and grandfather.  He and his wife, Dendy have three boys. Dr. Eberly enjoys music, writing, hiking and philosophy.  

Speaker: Louisa Olushoga, MD

Location: Westbrook 0015

Drawing from her experiences as a psychiatrist at Lawndale Christian Health Center in Chicago, IL, Dr. Olushoga will discuss the intersection of psychiatry and her Christian faith. This interactive workshop will explore the significant challenges and great rewards of her work on the west side of Chicago, particularly in area homeless shelters. Designed to be highly interactive, this workshop encourages participants to engage in meaningful discussions, ask questions, and share their own experiences. Attendees will gain valuable insights and a deeper understanding of what it means to integrate Christian faith into mental health practice.

Bio: Dr. Louisa Olushoga is a psychiatrist serving at Lawndale Christian Health Center. She is an accomplished lecturer and a community resource on topics such as mental health care amongst vulnerable populations, collective trauma, and psychiatric diagnosis/treatment during the peripartum period. A passionate advocate for women's mental health with a particular interest in minority populations, she helped establish the Women’s Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Chicago. Her commitment to the Chicago community and women’s health is evident in her work outside of the clinic, having served as Associate Board President for the Susan G. Komen Foundation. 

Speaker: Tenley Force, RN, BSN, MA

Location: Langford 041 

In nursing, transitioning into autonomous practice is often deemed as ‘the worst year of your life.’ This workshop will be focused on discussing practical ways that health care practitioners who are more advanced in their career can come alongside and help holistically support their new and emerging colleagues. Open to all medical professionals regardless of their specific role, built off the experiences of 51 registered nurses, with the intent that we can make medicine a healthier place for all who practice.

Bio: Tenley Force is a registered nurse from Southern California, with a Master of Arts in Biblical Exposition. Her clinical background includes medical-surgical respiratory, disaster response, public health, and nursing education. She is a current fellow at Duke Divinity School in the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative and is also a published author specializing in self-help for new nurses. Her book New: Nursing and the Art of Being Human debuted May 2023. It is her passion to equip nurses with tools to maintain their holistic sense of wellbeing in the midst of such a demanding profession.