The Comparison Project will hold its second spring 2019 event with a community dialogue on “miracles and medicine,” hosted by Dr. Richard Deming, founder and director of Above + Beyond Cancer, and director of the Mercy Cancer Center. The dialogue will be held at 7 p.m. on Thursday, March 7 at Mercy Hospital in Conference Rooms 6-7 in the East Tower.

Dialogue panelists include Monsignor Larry Beeson; Dr. David Friedgood, neurologist at Mercy Hospital; Dr. Rizwan Shah, pediatrician at Methodist Hospital; and Dr. Yosesh Shah, geriatrician at Broadlawns Hospital. Together with the moderator, they will explore questions and issues pertaining miracles and medicine: Do medical miracles occur? If so, in what sense? Do patients seek miracles in the course of medical treatment? Do patients and physicians, or patients and chaplains, discuss the possibility of miracles, and if so, how? Does hope of miracles serve a therapeutic end in medical treatment, or can hope of miracles be detrimental to the patient’s well-being? 

The Comparison Project enacts global philosophy of religion in the local Des Moines community. It is supported by Humanities Iowa, Cultivating Compassion: The Dr. Richard Deming Foundation, the Drake University Center for the Humanities, the Des Moines Area Religious Council, the Drake University Principal Financial Group Center for Global Citizenship, and the Medbury Fund.

Future events in The Comparison Project’s lecture and dialogue series on miracles include:

  • March 28, 7 p.m. – “Saintly ‘Miracles’ and Yogic ‘Magic’ in the Bhakti and Sufi Hagiographies of North India” at Sussman Theater.
  • April 11, 7 p.m. – “Miracles in Hasidic Judaism: Changing the Natural Order, or Opening the Eyes To What Is Already There” at Sussman Theater.

Future events in The Comparison Project’s “Meet My Religious Neighbor” open-house series include:

  • March 24, 11 a.m. – Hindu Temple and Cultural Center of Iowa.  
  • April 7, 9:30 a.m. – St. Demetrius Serbian Orthodox Church.

For more information, please visit http://comparisonproject.wp.drake.edu, or email: comparisonproject@drake.edu.