A Theology of Health

Tyler VanderWeele, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at Harvard, has written a watershed book. Published this past September with the University of Notre Dame Press, A Theology of Health: Wholeness and Human Flourishing will, in my view, eventually come to be understood as a groundbreaking classic. It is not overstating the case to say that, if this book is given its due, it could mark the beginning of a new and even stunning moment—one that makes space for explicitly theological ideas and reflection within the highest-level academic discussions of health. I hold this view for the following reasons: (a) the perch from which VanderWeele is working and writing, (b) the cultural moment and context in which he is working and writing, and (c) his confident, robust, and persuasive theological approach.

It is difficult to overstate the heights from which this book’s argument is being made. VanderWeele has an endowed chair at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health, is co-director of the Global Flourishing study (funded to the tune of more than $40 Million), is widely published at the highest levels of his field—having published both books and articles in secular presses and journals—and has received numerous awards for his work. He has the profound respect of his secular colleagues in public health—who, (in the preface to the book) he wonders (and perhaps even worries), may be “surprised” by its publication.

VanderWeele has good reasons to wonder—and perhaps even to worry. The Ivy League is well known as a bastion of hyper-secularized and even irreligious discourse (the exceptions prove the rule). But, as I have argued elsewhere, those who work in and around health and health care often take this kind of skepticism and marginalization to an even higher level. Although “thick” visions of the good that do not come explicitly from a religious tradition are most welcome partners in conversation (particularly when that vision of the good comes to certain “orthodox” conclusions about race and gender), the “thick” theological perspectives that ground VanderWeele in this book are most often implicitly or even explicitly marginalized. It will be very interesting to see which secular medical and bioethics journals end up reviewing this book and which do not, which conferences have panel discussions and other engagements with his book and which do not, and which universities invite him for talks related to the book and which do not.

Some early signs point to a typical and even boring response with respect to this particular bias. The June 2025 issue of SSM Mental Health, for instance, bemoans the book and VanderWeele’s approach more generally for its “entanglement with normative religious values.” The authors worry about religious impact on the secular state and claim: “Social science and theology are both worthy endeavors, but they are fundamentally different from one another.”

That is true, I guess, as far as it goes. But the implicit assumption here, that social science directed at learning more about health can be done without reference to a “thick” vision of the good in the background, is obviously false. VanderWeele reminds his readers that “conceptions of the health of the person, and arguably to some extent even the health of the body [see recent debates of so-called gender-affirming care as an obvious example], cannot be value neutral.” This is such a basic point that it hardly needs to be made, but VanderWeele knows that many of his colleagues will be put off by the very notion of his writing a book like this—and thus he ably suggests that they cannot write him off simply because he has a particular normative perspective. Everyone with an idea of human health has a particular normative perspective. There is no view (of health) from nowhere.

But it is not enough, for VanderWeele, to argue more generally that—because health is concerned with “wholeness”—an appropriately robust vision of health must focus on the physical, mental, and the spiritual. No, his focus on the spiritual dimensions of health refuses to pull theological punches, and it successfully avoids the allure of least-common-denominator-ism. He is up front about his deeply Catholic commitments, and about how arguments he makes draw heavily from the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Part II of the book, for instance, is on “Health and Sin,” while Part III is on “Healing and Salvation”—with one chapter in that section titled “Healing and Jesus Christ.” There is too much theological reflection in this book for a review of this length to give the reader an adequate sense of what is going on, but perhaps a few choice cuts from this chapter may hint at its flavor:

“Although our efforts at healing and restoration are important, ultimately, from the perspective of Christian theology, only God can provide a fuller healing. God is the principal agent of healing.”

“In response to John the Baptist’s question about Jesus’ identity, Jesus presented himself as a healer who enabled the blind to see, the lame to walk, the lepers to be cleansed, the deaf to hear, and dead to be raised. The gospels present Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection as somehow accomplishing transformation of a person’s character, bringing about a restoration to wholeness.”

God, in the person of Jesus Christ, is “taking on and redeeming our nature by providing us an example of love, by doing away with our guilt and re-creating our corrupted nature, by empowering us now to live more as God intended, and by promising a new resurrected life wherein full restoration can take place.”

VanderWeele’s engagement with theology and theological ideas is not only wild in his own academic context. There are many theologians who could be inspired by his work to be even more explicitly theological in their own work. Indeed, it is somewhat embarrassing that Catholic theologians who write on health-related topics while working at Catholic universities are very often less explicitly theological than this Harvard epidemiologist and biostatistician. (Though he did study theology at Oxford as an undergraduate.)

VanderWeele is not writing just for those who share his theological presuppositions, however. Indeed, he says that—though “complete consensus in this life will not be attainable”—he sees this work as part of an invitation to “collective pursuit of the truth together” and believes that refining our common understandings and disagreements can help us get closer to understanding the health of the human person. And he does write, at times, with less explicit theological heft—perhaps with this goal in mind. One place where this happens, and perhaps understandably so given that there are indeed objective matters on which we can agree (across other kinds of differences) in this area, is in his discussions of the health of the body. But his discussion here actually leads to a quibble: when one divides concern about human health into categories like physical, mental, and spiritual, one risks the kind of division and separation that is not only not theologically correct, but risks creating the conditions for the possibility of some of the most profound mistakes of our time when it comes to the body.

Consider the following passage from a section titled “The health of the body constitutes and contributes to the health of the person, or human flourishing”:

Moreover, bodily health contributes to human flourishing causally. It can enable flourishing. Full bodily health gives the person a capacity to carry out a variety of activities and pursuits, to move about freely, to pursue various purposes, to be with and interact with others and form relationships.

While VanderWeele is almost certainly not intending this, framing a discussion of the body this way risks running headlong into our current cultural mistake of thinking of bodies as something we have rather than things that we are. Aquinas is famous for insisting on our being ensouled bodies, not souls that have bodies. The latter view has given rise to the even bigger mistake of what Mary Harrington calls “Meat Lego Gnosticism”: the idea that the physical parts of our bodies are nothing more than contingent and exchangeable tools to be put at the service of the flourishing of our true and authentic mental and spiritual selves. From debates over transhumanism, to sex and gender and to contraception, the unity of the human person in her ensouled embodiment is an essential to get right.

In his “Nontheological Postscript” to his book, VanderWeele—while he peppers the text with appeals to those who do not share his theology—takes several pages to make his appeal to this intended audience explicit. Indeed, he says, “some of the positions and arguments that are put forward do not necessarily require the suppositions of Christian theology.” The World Health Organization’s definition of health, for instance, includes not just the absence of disease of infirmity, but focuses on physical, mental, and social well-being. Even without explicit reference to spirituality or theology, VanderWeele suggests that an expansive view of health—despite its clearly relying on normative claims—is something about which, at least in some areas, “it is possible to obtain a reasonable consensus.”

This is particularly true, he says, when it comes to the value of good, loving relationships. And here are some other areas where he thinks we may be able to achieve some consensus:

•         The value of spiritual traditions and even tradition-specific practices of medicine for human health;
•         The effect of wrongdoing (and especially individual and structural injustice) on human health;
•         The need for healing when moral injury has occurred;
•         The important role of forgiveness, especially when it comes to the health of relationships (both of individuals and communities);
•         The need to respect all life, and to care for the environment, as key for human health;
•         The importance and sometimes even transformative effect of mourning and responding to suffering, even as we try to alleviate it;
•         The desire of patients to have spiritual health and other spiritual concerns be directly addressed as part of their care;
•         And the data showing that religious and church communities promote the health of believers—and, through their missions and social services—promote the health of millions and millions around the world.

VanderWeele is under no illusions about disagreements regarding “the ultimate goal of human life and of human flourishing.” Given his context, how could he be? But, whether he knows it or not, his book is a masterclass example of employing the Focolare’s spirituality of unity, one in which he lovingly invites a dialogue where disagreements are explored and commonalities are discovered. He calls for an “exchange and sharing of ideas and understandings in order to learn from others and to explain our own understandings of health and well-being and the ultimate goals of human life.”

Some might dismiss this as naïve, but both objective facts and my own personal experience suggest that little green shoots are forming that may mean that this book is coming out at a new moment, one that may provide fertile ground for his approach. I’m not the only one to point out that, since it came to be dominated by philosophers, clinicians, and public health researchers, bioethics has taken a similar turn toward hyper-secularism and irreligion. But a recent Hastings Center Report piece titled “Why Bioethics Should Welcome Religion” suggests that there might be a new movement afoot. The five authors of the piece lament the decline of religious contributions in bioethics as “a misfortune, leading to a paucity of concepts, a thin imagination, and the ignorance of traditions.”

That such an article can appear in such a prestigious and secular journal as HCR is breathtaking. Speaking personally, I’ve recently been invited by a secular past president of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities to debate him on physician-assisted suicide at the upcoming annual meeting of that very secular society. I was also recently asked to contribute to a special issue on medical humanities in the very secular Monash Bioethics Review, and I was asked specifically because they wanted a strong theological perspective. (My contribution will be titled, “Why Theology Is Queen of the Medical Humanities.”)

Let me close with a final reflection on our current cultural moment and the change that is now underway. I’ve recently argued that the new administration, particularly through the “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement, provides a golden opportunity for a Catholic understanding of health to take center stage. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Means siblings, and several other figures are poised to put a white-hot spotlight on the ways in which many of our big institutions (pharma, health care, food/agriculture, and more) divide the human person into component physical parts and make gobs of money off lifestyles that lead to lifelong chronic diseases. While the MAHA critique is correct, there is plenty of room for thinking and engaging about what will replace the impoverished vision of health that got us into this mess. Tyler VanderWeele, and the vision he lays out in A Theology of Health, should be at the center of those conversations. 

Image by Vadim and licensed via Adobe Stock.