Health Policy and Applied Anthropology in the Catholic Church

Abstract

Decisions about health care often reflect moral choices, and they are often couched today in the discourse of social justice that has diffused from the religious to the secular sphere of American society. Although thinking about health care technology and service delivery in terms of moral values is hardly novel, it is still relatively uncommon for an applied anthropologist to seek to understand and advocate for health care reform from within an organized religious body, as I do within the Roman Catholic Church.