What: "No one much cares whether a theologian may or may not be heretical, but people do care whether a physician is qualified. I tell my students that if you want to have some sense of what the politics of medieval Catholicism was like you need only hang around the major medical centres associated with universities. People no longer believe that their salvation depends on priests, but they sure as hell believe that they do not want to die and they think, usually quite unrealistically, that medicine can significantly prolong their life, which accounts for the enormous prestige and power of medicine and medical knowledges in the university. However, this prestige and power is just as likely to corrupt a flourishing intellectual life, which was the case in the past for theology, as it is to engender it."

Writer: Stanley Hauerwas

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Date: Apr 27 2012 10:57 PM