(Editor's note: A recent reception at the Center celebrated the awarding by the White House of the National Humanities Medal [see the Bulletin for Nov/Dec 1997] to Martin E. Marty. As the George B. Caldwell senior scholar-in-residence at a center for the study of "health, faith, and ethics," Marty talked about the humanities, and its connection with the faith and health themes. The following is a condensed version of his remarks.)

When the U.S. Congress set up the National Endowment for the Humanities it listed the disciplines that make up the humanities. The legislators named all the familiar list-leaders such as literature, history, and philosophy. But they also included "comparative" religion and ethics, precisely the disciplines that, from day one, this Center has set out to relate to all aspects of health. So there should be no need to justify or explain the connections.

Still, more citizens recognize the arts — also honored with a National Medal for the Arts — than the humanities. In describing what the humanities do, as set forth by the National Humanities Commission of which I was privileged to be a part, we can make the connections to health themes more obvious and clear.

When the Center was founded, I began to get invitations to speak regularly on "medical ethics." I turned them down, explaining that I was "neither medical nor ethical." (That sounds a bit lighthearted, but, then, President Clinton's citation mentioned that I was "playful," so playful we must be.) I meant that I had no formal disciplinary training in medicine or ethics. So what was I doing here at such a center?

The answer becomes clear to anyone who watches our staff and consultants in action. We are "doing" the humanities every day, which means we are humanists. Some religious people dismiss humanists as being secular and godless. Not at all. Philosopher Ernest Gellner explains the confusion of terms. The term "humanist," according to Gellner, survives from the days when a concern with mundane, "human" literature was primarily distinguished not from either illiteracy or science, but from theological, divine concerns. "But 'humanist' concerns now embrace the divine," Gellner says, adding: "Both speak the same language."

So not only is our ethics work, theological or not — but always stressing the "faith dimension" — directly a part of the humanities, but our "faith" concern itself is humanist in our many interreligious zones of inquiry. Again, however, one asks, what does all this have to do with disease and health, caring and curing, since we are not a generic humanities institute?

Whenever sacred literature is read to a sick person in order to promote well-being, whenever a story works its challenging or soothing effect, whenever what a thinker long ago called "the consolation of philosophy" is offered to help a sufferer make some sense of things, whenever someone is moved by a poem to help find worth in a day of pain, whenever exemplary lives in the fields of medical or ethical inquiry are held before us, we are putting the humanities to work or, better in this context, into play.

In my own case, when I do address what goes by the code name "medical ethics," I act as an historian, philosopher, or theologian who explores past and present in order to address, for example, what "pluralism" in our emergent culture does to moral decision-making. During my years with the Park Ridge Center, I have not known a moment when a topic at hand could not be and was not being informed by what humanists bring to the table.

It is my hope that in the years ahead the Park Ridge Center can make ever more and better contributions to "medical humanities" and parallel fields. And that I can have a part in that work, even as I am grateful to my colleagues for helping me celebrate whatever measure of achievement there has been to date. Thank you.

Martin E. Marty The humanities mirror our own image and our image of the world. Through the humanities we reflect on the fundamental question, what does it mean to be human? The humanities offer clues but never a complete answer. They reveal how people have tried to make moral, spiritual, and intellectual sense of a world in which irrationality, despair, loneliness, and death are as conspicuous as birth, friendship, hope, and reason. We learn how individuals or societies define the moral life and try to attain it, attempt to reconcile freedom and the responsibilities of citizenship, and express themselves artistically . . . . By awakening a sense of what it might be like to be someone else or to live in another time or culture, they tell us about ourselves, stretch our imagination, and enrich our experience. They increase our distinctively human potential. — Martin Marty