MEDIA ADVISORY: The 3rd Annual Conference on Medicine & Religion

WHAT: Conference: Responding to the Limits and Possibilities of the BodyWHO: Health care professionals, scholars and studentsWHEN: March 7-9, 2014 WHERE: Hyatt Chicago Magnificent MileHOW: RSVP to Daniel Kim, 773-702-0912

Medicine exists because of the limits and frailties of the human body, as well as its possibilities; and medicine is shaped by what we expect the body to be and do. As such, health care practices depend on and display answers to important questions about human embodiment, such as:

• How is one's body related to oneself? • What is a normal human body? • What, if anything, does the human body tell us about how medicine should respond to bodily suffering and death? • What kind of knowledge about human embodiment can science give, vis-à-vis the great religions? The 3rd Annual Conference on Medicine and Religion invites health care professionals and scholars to reflect on these questions and their implications for contemporary medicine.

The conference is a forum for exchanging ideas from an array of disciplinary backgrounds and approaches, including both analytical and empirical scholarship, descriptions of what is as well as arguments about what should be, accounts of relevant experiences as well as reflections on the meaning of those experiences.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:Baruch Brody, Rice UniversityArthur W. Frank, University of CalgaryM. Therese Lysaught, Loyola University ChicagoIngrid Mattson, Huron University College at the University of Western Ontario

The three-day conference invites participants to address these and other questions by looking to the traditions and practices of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Sponsors of the conference are:• Program on Medicine and Religion, University of ChicagoInstitute for Spirituality and Health, Texas Medical CenterAlbert Gnaegi Center for Health Care Ethics, Saint Louis University

This conference is sponsored in part by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

For a conference schedule and to learn more, visit the Medicine and Religion conference web site.

###About the University of Chicago MedicineThe University of Chicago Medicine and its Comer Children’s Hospital rank among the best in the country, most notably for cancer treatment, according to U.S. News & World Report’s survey of the nation’s hospitals. The University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine has been named one of the Top 10 medical schools in the nation, by U.S. News’ "Best Graduate Schools" survey. University of Chicago physician-scientists performed the first organ transplant and the first bone marrow transplant in animal models, the first successful living-donor liver transplant, the first hormone therapy for cancer and the first successful application of cancer chemotherapy. Its researchers discovered REM sleep and were the first to describe several of the sleep stages. Twelve of the Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the University of Chicago Medicine.Visit our research blog at sciencelife.uchospitals.edu and our newsroom at uchospitals.edu/news.Twitter @UChicagoMedFacebook.com/UChicagoMed