Caring for the Whole Person in a Technological Age

Friday & Saturday, August 7–8, 2026—Registration is now OPEN for the 3rd Annual Anselm House Healthcare Symposium with keynote speaker Dr. Daniel Sulmasy, MD, PhD (Georgetown University).

Modern healthcare emphasizes a clinician’s diligent and competent technical prowess. Modern medicine was profoundly formed in the context of 20th century modernity and a mentality that sociologist Jacque Elull called “A Technological Age.” Everything about modern healthcare now revolves around technology in service of efficiency. Yet, few clinicians entered healthcare to fill check boxes or produce widgets. And yet to survive many clinicians feel they have to abandon the deeper interpersonal and existential reasons that brought them to caring work.

Older wisdom suggests humans are not just brains attached to machines weighing their options and optimizing their preferences. They are whole beings, whole persons with intrinsic worth worthy of care as children of God. If healthcare work is a whole person business, it must recover or reawaken embodied presence and attunement to another’s physical, emotional, and spiritual needs as the basis for that work. What may once have been taken for granted before modern medicine’s genesis, must now be reclaimed, articulated, defended, and practiced ideally counterformative community, shaping a clinician’s thinking (head), acting (hands), as well as in their emotions and desires (heart) over an entire career.

This two-day healthcare symposium will explore what it means to care for the whole person in the health professions including intellectual, practical, and attitudinal dimensions. Through engaging lectures, conversations, reading, reflection and fellowship, we will re-awaken and inspire clinicians for the head-heart-hands wholeness of healing work in the midst of dehumanizing forces in modern high-tech healthcare.

~

“God comes into the midst of healthcare with all the immediacy of human encounters…God is in the healing, and the healing is in our relationship with God.” – Daniel P. Sulmasy, MD, PhD

Guided by the work of physician, philosopher, and former Franciscan friar, Daniel Sulmasy we for our symposium we will think, read, discuss, commune together and meditate on the symposium’s theme from different dimensions returning participants to their busy professions with a fuller sense of God’s presence in the imperfect goodness of healthcare work.

The symposium is open to healthcare students, residents, and faculty from both the University of Minnesota and the Mayo Clinic, as well all healthcare professionals from across the Twin Cities, and the Upper Midwest.

Registration is NOW OPEN. CME credits will be available for physicians, dentists, nurses, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and mental health professionals.

Ticket Pricing:

Healthcare Students/Residents – $50 ($55.20 incl. fees)

UMN & Mayo Clinic Faculty and Staff – $150 ($161.90 incl. fees)

Other Healthcare Professionals – $250 ($268.61 incl. fees)

*Scholarship money is available. Please contact Phil Letizia for more information - [email protected].

Biography for Dr. Dan Sulmasy, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Sulmasy is Director of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and a Senior Research Scholar. Dr. Sulmasy holds a joint appointment at the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics. He is the inaugural André Hellegers Professor of Biomedical Ethics, with co-appointments in the Departments of Philosophy and Medicine at Georgetown. His research interests encompass both theoretical and empirical investigations of the ethics of end-of-life decision-making, ethics education, and spirituality in medicine. Read Dr. Sulmasy’s full bio.

The Healthcare Initiative at Anselm House

The Healthcare Initiative at Anselm House, led by Dr. Phil Letizia, PhD, seeks to grow healthcare students, faculty, and providers at the University of Minnesota and Mayo Clinic in wisdom and Christlikeness. This interdisciplinary network regularly gathers to network, learn from Christian sages in healthcare fields, and deeply contemplate the big questions that Christian healthcare providers face.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Healthcare Initiative