Category: blog

The Yale Program for Medicine, Spirituality & Religion is founded upon the belief that healing concerns the wellness of both the body and the spirit. We seek to understand the implications of religious practice, communal support, and intrinsic belief for the health and wellness. We are scholarly in focus, seeking evidence to discern how the worlds of medicine and religion impact one another. We are collaborative in spirit, reaching across Yale University and other institutions to foster dialogue and research.
As scholars and practitioners, we recognize the deep influence that religious and spiritual commitments have in medicine and illness. Religious and spiritual beliefs inform ethical choices, attitudes concerning death and grieving, approaches to suffering and illness, and commitments to justice and fairness. We seek diverse perspectives through collaboration with colleagues from divinity, chaplaincy, public health, legal, and medical communities. This podcast is a collection of our public monthly seminar series. Enjoy!

For more information and to get on our mailing list, please check out our website: ypmsr.yale.edu

Find the Good

Find the Good

In this episode, you will hear Paulette Marcus reading her story at a book reading we head in 2021. Paulette reminds us that being positive helps so much, but being positive takes work and energy. Paulette leaned on her Jewish faith, her extended family, friends, and all the support offered at Yale to walk through a long battle with cancer all while raising her two beautiful daughters.

PhD Podcast Project: Lizzie White, Public Health

PhD Podcast Project: Lizzie White, Public Health

The Ph.D. Podcast Project features the diverse and groundbreaking research conducted by current and recent Yale graduate students. In interviews by their graduate peers, graduate researchers discuss what motivates them, their innovations and research process, and the unusual challenges they have faced in their journey.

OCS Podcasts (full episode list) – https://ocs.yale.edu/podcast

Professor Jamil Drake: Can Religion Play a Healthy Role in American Politics?

Professor Jamil Drake: Can Religion Play a Healthy Role in American Politics?

YDS alumna Emily Judd speaks to Assistant Professor of African American Religious History Jamil Drake about whether religion can play a healthy role in US politics; which political issues are being emphasized among Black church communities today; and how one survey in Virginia in the 1800s continues to negatively shape perceptions of Black Americans.

Ep. 34 – Daniel Pauly on why overfishing is a Ponzi scheme

Ep. 34 – Daniel Pauly on why overfishing is a Ponzi scheme

Born in Paris to an African-American GI and a French woman at the end of World War II, Dr. Daniel Pauly rose from a difficult and extraordinarily unusual childhood in Europe to become one of the most daring, productive, and influential fisheries scientists in the history of the field — and the first to illuminate the global extent and significance of overfishing. A professor and principal investigator of the Sea Around Us Project at the University of British Columbia, Dr. Pauly has devoted his career to studying and documenting the impact of fisheries on marine ecosystems and advocating for cutting-edge policies to address it. The software, scientific tools, and methods he and his research team developed have transformed understanding of how humans are impacting oceans. His research makes very clear that fish are in global peril — and so, in turn, are we. If our species manages to reverse course and avoid the “watery horror show,” as he calls it, for which we’re on track, it will be thanks in large part to his and his colleagues’ vision, courage, and decades of tireless work. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Pauly about the “toxic triad” that characterizes modern fisheries (catches are underreported, science is ignored, and the environment is blamed when fish populations collapse as a result), how “shifting baseline syndrome” — a term he coined — results in slow and inadequate responses to overfishing and climate change, why fish are shrinking and struggling to breathe as oceans warm, and why we need to end high seas fishing and government subsidies of international fishing fleets.

Ep. 28 – Bathsheba Demuth on capitalism, communism and arctic ecology

Ep. 28 – Bathsheba Demuth on capitalism, communism and arctic ecology

In her acclaimed first book, “Floating Coast,” historian Bathsheba Demuth explores how capitalism, communism and ecology have clashed for over 150 years in the remote region of Beringia, the Arctic lands and waters stretching between Russia and Canada. Demuth trekked through the landscape and historical archives in search of answers to questions such as: How did whales become known through the labor of their killing? What happened when human ideas of “progress” were subject to the pressures of arctic life? Why did the superpowers’ grand attempts to cultivate a reindeer farming industry fail? In this episode, we speak with Demuth about these questions and about how creatures like bowheads whales were understood, imagined, and treated vastly differently by three distinct groups of hunters over the past two centuries — indigenous Yupik and Inupiaq whalers, capitalist whalers, and communist whalers — and the fundamental role animals themselves played in how its history unfolded.

Professor Crystal Feimster on the Long Civil Rights Movement

Professor Crystal Feimster on the Long Civil Rights Movement

In recognition of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, President Salovey and Professor Feimster discuss the “long” civil rights movement, the contributions of civil rights activist Pauli Murray, and how Yale students are using the university’s archival and museum collections in their classes.

Negotiating Your Salary & Benefits Package

Negotiating Your Salary & Benefits Package

The group is joined by two colleagues, Derek Webster (Office of Career Strategy, Common Good & Creative Careers) and Maggie Katz (Center for International and Professional Experience) to discuss the trials and tribulations of the salary/benefits negotiation process. Yes, after all the stress and tumult of getting the actual job, your work is not quite done yet! The group goes through the very important aspects of this process, where efforts can yield benefits years down the line!

Ep. 24 – Christopher Ketcham on the abuse of the American West

Ep. 24 – Christopher Ketcham on the abuse of the American West

For the past ten years, journalist Christopher Ketcham has documented the confluence of commercial exploitation and government misconduct on public lands across the West, the role of the livestock and energy industries in their despoliation, and the impact of rampant federal land management agency capture on wildlife. We speak with Ketcham about his fierce new book, This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption Are Ruining the American West, which Outside Magazine called “the Desert Solitaire of our time.” The national commons that Ketcham focuses on — hundreds of millions of acres stretching across 12 Western states — are managed on the public’s behalf by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. Both agencies operate with a “multiple use mandate.” This means they are required to strike a balance between using the land for purposes that generate economic profit and protecting the health of the ecosystem. But today, Ketcham says, “multiple use” is multiple abuse and our public lands — and the wild animals and plants that depend on them — are being pillaged, poisoned, and assaulted by industries and the government agencies captured by them.

Ep. 19 – Robert Macfarlane on being good ancestors across deep time

Ep. 19 – Robert Macfarlane on being good ancestors across deep time

“Books, like landscapes, leave their marks in us,” Robert Macfarlane once wrote. “Certain books, though, like certain landscapes, stay with us even when we left them, changing not just our weathers but our climates.” Macfarlane’s writing has done this for us and for millions of readers. It has shifted our climates for the better, deepened our sympathies, expanded our understanding of and attention to our moral and physical landscapes, and reminded us of the stakes of being alive. In this episode, Macfarlane joins us to speak about his new book, Underland: A Deep Time Journey. In the book, Macfarlane explores how we humans shape value across expanses of “deep time” — geological time in which the units of measurement are eons and epochs, not days or years — and asks: Are we being good ancestors? “When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert,” he writes. “New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless earth.”