Center for Clinical Bioethics

Elizabeth Davenport

Section: Visiting Scholar Program

Elizabeth Davenport, PhD, Visiting Scholar November 14-29, 2007. Dr. Davenport is Senior Associate Dean of Religious Life; Faculty, USC Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California.

Research Topic:  Bilogical and Ethical Considerations in Medical Practice in Relation to Understanding Spirituality as Preservative of Lieb (lived-body) and Lebesnwelt (lifeworld): Feminist Ethical, Spiritual, and Methodological Perspectives.

Research Summary:
There is an ethical basis for acknowledging and accommodating patients' spirituality in medical practice - based on biological understanding of spirituality as an experiential process that evokes/enjoins particular physiological substrates that appear to support an implicit sense of self and to prevent ego-loss. These substrates are preservative for Leib (lived-body) and Lebenswelt (lifeworld). This contemporary biological model -- as contrasted with the more mechanical model on which the ethics of 20th century medicine were based--sustains a phenomenological appreciation of spirituality as subjective experience as shaped by geno-phenotype-environmental interactions across the lifespan, and first-person experience of self-in-life. I am interested in examining the implications of these ethical and biological considerations for the spiritual component of medical ethics, as developed by Dr. James Giordano, from an interdisciplinary perspective informed by current developments in feminist ethics, spirituality, and methodology.