This book illuminates issues in medical ethics revolving around the complex bond between healer and patient, focusing on friendship and other important values in the healing relationship. Embracing medicine, philosophy, theology, and bioethics, it considers whether bioethical issues in medicine, nursing, and dentistry can be examined from the perspective of the healing relationship rather than external moral principles.

Distinguished contributors explore the role of the health professional, the moral basis of health care, greater emphasis on the humanities in medical education, and some of the current challenges facing healers today.

Hearing Things is a meditation on sound’s work in literature. Drawing on critical works and the commentaries of many poets and novelists who have paid close attention to the role of the ear in writing and reading, Angela Leighton offers a reconsideration of literature itself as an exercise in hearing.

An established critic and poet, Leighton explains how we listen to the printed word, while showing how writers use the expressivity of sound on the silent page. Although her focus is largely on poets—Alfred Tennyson, W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Walter de la Mare, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Jorie Graham, and Alice Oswald—Leighton’s scope includes novels, letters, and philosophical writings as well. Her argument is grounded in the specificity of the text under discussion, but one important message emerges from the whole: literature by its very nature commands listening, and listening is a form of understanding that has often been overlooked. Hearing Things offers a renewed call for the kind of criticism that, avoiding the programmatic or purely ideological, remains alert to the work of sound in every literary text.

Burnout is common among doctors in the West, so one might assume that a medical career in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world, would place far greater strain on the idealism that drives many doctors. But, as A Heart for the Work makes clear, Malawian medical students learn to confront poverty creatively, experiencing fatigue and frustration but also joy and commitment on their way to becoming physicians. The first ethnography of medical training in the global South, Claire L. Wendland’s book is a moving and perceptive look at medicine in a world where the transnational movement of people and ideas creates both devastation and possibility.

Wendland, a physician anthropologist, conducted extensive interviews and worked in wards, clinics, and operating theaters alongside the student doctors whose stories she relates. From the relative calm of Malawi’s College of Medicine to the turbulence of training at hospitals with gravely ill patients and dramatically inadequate supplies, staff, and technology, Wendland’s work reveals the way these young doctors engage the contradictions of their circumstances, shedding new light on debates about the effects of medical training, the impact of traditional healing, and the purposes of medicine.

To mark the 40th anniversary of John Paul II's encyclical on human work, published in 1981, a group of globally-recognized scholars presents the critical aspects of this document and its purpose. These original essays revisit John Paul II's approach to work in post-modern society and reconnect the dignity of the working person to a pursuit of holiness. These authors convey that only when it is truly Christian can humanism accomplish the lofty ideals it indicates.
This book is a timely contribution to the field of scholarship that focuses on Catholic Social Thought and is ideally suited for graduate studies and the reader interested in more serious questions in Christian theology. 

Giulio Maspero, "The Bible and the Fathers of the Church on Work"
Patricia Ranft, "Work Theology in the High Middle Ages"
Angela Franks, "John Paul II's Metaphysics of Labor"
Deborah Savage, "Confronting a Technocratic Future: Women's Work and the Church's Social Vision"
Martin Schlag, "Contemplation at Work: A Theological Conversation Between John Paul II and Josemaría Escrivá"
Richard Turnbull, "Laborem Exercens: A Protestant Appreciation"
Michael Naughton, "Good Work: Insights from the Subjective Dimension of Work"
Christopher Michaelson, "Subjects and Objects in Meaningful Work"
Javier Ignacio Pinto Garay and Alvaro Pezoa Bissieres, "The Worker and the Transistor: The Dignity of Work and Business Ethics in Global Corporate Practices"
Gonzalo Flores-Castro Lingán, "The Real Work: Making the Encyclical Laborem Exercens Operational"
Geoffrey C. Friesen, "Laborem Exercens and the Subjective Dimension of Work in Economics and Finance"