Aims

1. Demonstrating how difficult it is to define the dignity of the human being exhaustively, also showing the need to identify and express this dignity, according to philosophical or religious beliefs.
2. Examining the causes and consequences of the privatization of this need in the contemporary society and more particularly in the organization of the health services.
3. Outlining the practical and theoretical conditions of employment in a pluralistic society so that patients and their nurses are not only respected in their conception of human dignity but are also invited to express and confront them in front of others.
4. Envisaging from the evangelical accounts, the way by which the Christian faith conceives human dignity, suffering, death and the necessary ethics, and stimulating the student‚s interest for all the other symbolic representations of such experiences.

Main themes

- Accounts illustrating the Œspiritual need‚ of patients, whether Christians or atheists.
- Foundations, forces and the nature of the Œspiritual need‚.
- The true language of spiritual life.
- Sociological survey of happiness in Occident while people are still very well.
- Crisis and adjustments of meaning when people fall ill.
- The neuralgic spots of the spiritual struggle.
- Causes of the privatization of the spiritual struggle.
- Consequences of the public marginalization of the spiritual.
- The questioning of philosophical and religious pluralism.
- The Christian view of human dignity.
- The Christian view suffering and death.
- The Christian view surgical operations.
- The Christian view of ethics and laws. A list of themes is proposed to the students who choose collectively those they feel most concerned with. The doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church is
then outlined and commented on by the lecturer. Finally, the students are asked to take part in discussions.

Content and teaching methods

There is no lack of ethical questioning in today‚s society, which is searching references since it is being confronted with a fast evolution of the technosciences especially so in the medical sphere.
The complexity of human situations created consequently is such that it is becoming urgent to ask these questions again so as to know what has to be done, to do it well. But at the very moment when the question arises, it becomes apparent very quickly that the answers proposed often differ because they refer to different basic ethics. This course should examine what light is projected by the gospels on contemporary ethical questions and should also make apparent that the God of Jesus Christ, far from depriving men and women of their freedom, invites them to be partners and actors of their own history. It is in this context that the relation between ethics and the Magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church will be closely examined.

Methodology : a series of lectures with some time devoted to questioning.

Other information (prerequisite, evaluation (assessment methods), course materials recommended readings, ...)

The student will be asked to write (maximum 1 page) about a meeting with a patient who touched and moved them particularly and to comment on what was said with reference to the lectures. Those students who could not choose which meeting to write about or who would not like to get too involved personally are requested to find an account of the patients‚ spiritual life in literature or in other media and to comment on it.
Oral examination based on the lectures.

Other credits in programs