2. Professor Joshua Hordern

Professor Joshua Hordern

Professor Joshua Hordern
Associate Professor of Christian Ethics
Lecturer in Theology, Jesus College
01865 281479
joshua.hordern@theology.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

Affections, political theology, healthcare, Islam, conscience and loyalty

Research projects and public engagement:

To discuss any of these research initiatives, please contact Dr Hordern.

 

 

Service on public bodies:

General Interests:

Hill-walking, cricket, travel.

 

 

Selected Publications

  • Compassion in Healthcare: Practical Policy for Civic Life

    2019
    |
    Book

  • Compassion and responsibility for disease: Trump, tragedy and mercy

    2018
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Theology
    Thinking about compassion helps to illumine what is pernicious and what is beneficial about an emphasis on personal responsibility for health. This article considers whether it is compatible with compassion to conceive of someone’s disease as a consequence and embodiment of past faults and poor decisions. Two traditions, one Aristotelian and tragedic and the other Thomist and merciful, yield two ideas of compassion. It is argued that disease should not be conceived as something for which one is responsible in a way which puts at risk the possibility of receiving treatment. Even if there is the possibility of not receiving treatment, the past moral responsibility of the agent is not thought the decisive factor but rather the likely benefit to the patient who is perhaps ‘non-cooperative’ or ‘unwilling’ to care for themselves. As regards present-day healthcare, this leads to an affirmation both of preventive medicine as a moral endeavor and of the pastoral care of the sick, with discretion as to the manner and timing of any focus on responsibility.
    Collaborative deliberation, mercy, tragedy, Aquinas, compassion, responsibility, disease

  • Covenant, Compassion and Marketisation in Healthcare: the mastery of Mammon and the service of grace

    2018
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Marketisation, Ethics and Healthcare: Policy, Practice and Moral Formation
    This chapter argues that covenantal thought and practice has the capacity to discipline marketisation processes in service of an ethos of gracious compassion in healthcare. It engages critically with the analyses of Diagnosis Related Groups, Personal Budgets and Defensive Medicine offered by Feiler, Herring, Papanikitas and Jani in the preceding three chapters, showing that the key themes of ‘care’ and ‘work’ can be illumined by a covenantal approach which works judiciously with healthcare marketisation. Constructively, it draws on parallels in the Armed Services to argue for five required characteristics of a written and institutionalised Healthcare Covenant between health and care workers and the public. Drawing on traditions of pastoral and political theology to explore the psychological and social influences of marketisation, this chapter provides the bridge between the systemic issues of Part I, the policy concerns of Part II and the questions of professional ethics considered in Part III.

  • Hopes and fears in palliative care: talking about dying is everyone’s responsibility

    2018
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Commentary
    This article is about the role of hope in conversations we have about the end of life, and how to reckon with hope and fear in practice.

  • Compassion in Primary and Community Healthcare

    2018
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Radcliffe Handbook of Primary Care Ethics
    Compassion is an attribute of a person’s affective understanding which seeks shared experience of the world’s ills and some alleviation of those ills’ effects. Compassion is cognitive, participative and alleviative. Compassion alleviates suffering by participating in it. Compassion’s cognitive content is shaped by the circumstances and beliefs of those concerned. Since present-day civic life is plural, primary and community healthcare workers’ compassionate understanding must grasp people’s diverse ways of perceiving health and illness. However, while taking patient perceptions seriously rightly excludes professional paternalism, it does not mean that compassion involves uncritical acquiescence to patient perceptions. What is required is a compassion suited for this ‘secular’ time when ultimate questions about human life and suffering have not been finally answered and in which diverse perceptions meet in sometimes critical conversation. Such conversation takes time. And so a lack of or misuse of time may result in failing to reach the goal of compassion and in doing injustice to some in favour of others. Compassion is not in opposition to justice but rather a constitutive feature of justice’s realisation. If both compassion and justice are to characterise practice, both a supportive organisational ethos and regular personal refreshment are required. Pointing to one rich source of refreshment, the motto of the Royal College of General Practitioners, cum scientia caritas, wisely emphasises the greatest of the three theological virtues, love.
    • More
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