The Conference on Medicine and Religion
"The Prophetic Voice: Creativity, Compassion, and the Pursuit of Healing"
Sunday, March 22, 2026, at 2:00 p.m. - Tuesday, March 24, 2026, at 4:00 p.m.
Hilton Houston Post Oak
Houston, Texas
The call for Abstracts is now open!
It will close on Monday, November 3, 2025, at 11:59 PM CST.
A student essay competition will be announced soon.
We gather in a moment marked by profound institutional upheaval, political polarization, and cultural disharmony. Clinicians, educators, scholars, and faith leaders alike are navigating burnout, misinformation, and abrupt policy shifts while trying to keep time with the moral, practical, and relational rhythms of their work. Yet, through this cacophony, how can spiritually-informed healthcare be a witness for good?
Religious traditions have long offered not only moral frameworks but also cultural expressions—music, rituals, architecture, food, and stories—that sustain communities through times of suffering and transformation. Similarly, in medicine, healing practices have always involved more than just clinical intervention; they have drawn on deep wells of creativity, imagination, presence, and meaning.
The 2026 Conference on Medicine and Religion invites participants to explore how the expressions of religious traditions have the capacity to critique and to creatively reimagine medicine and the pursuit of healing. How do religious and medical voices speak prophetically to today's critical issues: institutional collapse, medical workforce shortages, scientific distrust, moral injury, and emerging technologies? How do cultural, musical, textual, and artistic expressions from religious traditions help communities hold grief, envision justice, and rekindle hope?
As always, we welcome scholarly engagement with theological and clinical questions. But this year, we also create space for experience: to hear sacred music, to share meals, to dwell in ritual, and to witness one another’s traditions. Hosted in Houston, a city renowned for its extraordinary religious and cultural diversity, this conference will serve as both a forum for rigorous dialogue and an experiential gathering.
We invite reflection across traditions on questions such as:
What does it mean to speak prophetically within medicine?
How can collective, creative expression heal medicine’s moral imagination in an age of burnout and bureaucratic strain?
Can music, story, or ritual restore what data and policy cannot?
What resources of wisdom do religious forms of praise and lament offer medical institutions under duress?
How can clinicians, scholars, and chaplains serve as trustworthy witnesses amid polarization?