My interests and scholarly work engages theological anthropology and ethics, philosophy, and the world that technology is building around us. Four strands emerge from these efforts.
The first asks what happens to us when technology stops being a tool we use and becomes our world. My second book The Art of Living for a Technological Age (Fortress, 2021) argued that the real danger isn't any particular gadget but a slow reshaping of the imagination—a training in efficiency and control that quietly corrodes the attentiveness and vulnerability that make us persons. A new book project, Formed Otherwise (under review at McGill-Queen's University Press), pushes the argument into the architecture of a world we can no longer step outside of, drawing on Ursula Franklin, phenomenology, and the Christian moral tradition. A parallel set of articles, written with colleagues, asks what all of this is doing to physicians.
The second thread concerns the ethics of the sickly body—the phenomenology of illness, frailty, and dying as moral experiences in their own right. Resourcing Hope for Ageing and Dying in a Broken World (Anthem, 2022), my third book, reflects a significant contribution to this strand, while taking the existential gravity of pain, burden, and despair seriously without surrendering to it. Current essays press further on the beauty of aged bodies in a culture besotted with youth, on the tragic shape of clinical encounters with suffering, and on the ethics of medical assistance in dying in Canada, where the ground is shifting beneath our feet.
The third strand concerns the moral formation of healthcare professionals and the ways institutions can deform as easily as form medical workers. Building the Character Cooperatives at Columbia University's medical school (2022 - 2025) gave this abstract question daily, practical texture.
A fourth strand wonders what a theological phenomenology of illness look like—one that takes seriously how suffering opens onto meaning, community, and transcendence? An invited keynote and book chapter for a Bavarian research centre on inter-religious perspectives on health mark its first steps.
publications
and scholarly efforts
For opinions and advice writings, click on the links for my opinions at Sojourners or Broadview.
For a selection of my scholarly publications, including journal articles, book chapters, monographs, and edited books, see the following:
Dispatches is a series I co-edited with my Scott Kirkland, who is the John and Jeanne Stockdale Senior Lecturer in Practical Theology and Ethics at Trinity College Theological School, Melbourne, Australia. The series authors illuminate and explore, creatively and concisely, the implications and relevance of theology for the global crises of late-modernity.
About
I am a Canadian (born and raised in Estevan, Saskatchewan) whose scholarly work tends to be found at the intersections of theology, philosophy, and medicine/health care. At present, I am the Associate Professor of Bioethics in the Department of Religion at Baylor University. I am concurrently a Research Fellow at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, a Research Associate at Vancouver School of Theology, and a Fellow with the James M Houston Centre for Humanity & the Common Good at Regent College.
Previously, I was the Assistant Professor of Medical Ethics and McDonald Scholar in the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics (directed by Dr Lydia Dugdale) at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons in NYC. At Columbia I was the intellectual curator and director of the Columbia Character Cooperatives (medical students) and the co-director with Dr Beatriz Desanti de Oliveira of the Character and Clinical Ethics Pathway (internal medicine residents), which were both novel educational programming in ethics education and professional/ moral formation. I also had the privilege of serve as the McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in Christian Ethics and Public Life with the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life at the University of Oxford, where I was also a senior member of Christ Church College. I was also appointed a humanities and healthcare fellow with a Wellcome Trust ISSF funded project, 'Advancing medical professionalism: integrating humanities teaching in the University of Oxford's medical school'. In addition to these recent roles, my academic background includes training in theology, bioethics and health policy, and applied physiology.
I owe a great deal to those scholars who've invested their time and energy into my academic formation, including Professors John C McDowell, Terry Lovat, Archie Spencer, Cad Dennehy, Carole Schneider (1950-2013), and Douglas Miller.
