Bioethics and Healthcare Theology

Program Overview

The Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Bioethics and Healthcare Theology prepares scholars, chaplains, and clinicians to reason carefully about medicine, the body, and the limits of intervention. Bioethical questions arrive with a deadline attached: a family must decide tonight, a committee must publish a policy, a legislature must vote. People in those rooms need more than intuition, and the church needs voices that are theologically serious and clinically informed. Students study the moral traditions the field uses — principlism, natural law, virtue ethics, casuistry, and narrative approaches — and then work through the substantive questions: the beginning of life, reproductive technology, prenatal screening and selective abortion; genetics, gene editing, and enhancement; organ donation and transplantation; research ethics and informed consent, including in low-resource settings; mental health, addiction, and coercion; disability and the assessment of quality of life; end-of-life care, withdrawal of treatment, palliative sedation, assisted dying, and the definition of death; resource allocation, triage, and pandemic ethics; and conscience protection for practitioners. Throughout, theological anthropology does real work: what the body is, what suffering means, what it is to care for someone who cannot be cured. The dissertation makes an original contribution on a question of bioethics or healthcare theology. Graduates teach bioethics, serve on clinical ethics committees, lead chaplaincy and institutional ethics programmes, advise denominations and health systems, and write for both clinical and church audiences.

Core Courses

• BIO 801 — Moral Frameworks in Bioethics (6 credits)
• BIO 812 — Theology of the Body, Suffering, and Care (6 credits)
• BIO 824 — Beginning of Life and Reproductive Technology (6 credits)
• BIO 836 — End of Life, Death, and Dying (6 credits)
• BIO 848 — Genetics, Research Ethics, and Justice (5 credits)
• BIO 860 — Research Design in Bioethics (4 credits)
• BIO 899 — Doctoral Dissertation in Bioethics (24 credits)

Admission Requirements

• Master's degree in theology, philosophy, religious studies, ethics, or a related field
• Prior study in philosophy, the sciences, or another discipline the specialization engages
• Statement of purpose naming the question your research will address
• Academic writing sample demonstrating sustained argument
• Current curriculum vitae
• Official transcripts from prior institutions when available