Title: ‘Doctor’ of the Church: Mapping the Religious Threads in Paul Farmer’s Writings
Abstract: This chapter serves as a review essay, providing an annotated bibliography of Farmer’s corpus for readers more familiar with ecclesiology than ethambutol. Farmer was a social medicine physician who spent his career between the poorest places of the work and Harvard, creating a substantive corpus of written work. Most ofhis writing focused on medicine, global health, or medical anthropology, the ‘ore’ from which this chapter tries to concentrate his theological ‘gold.’ Until roughly the last decade of his life, Farmer did not speak or write much about his relationship with faith or his religious tradition. Before then, when he did, he spoke of it askance—either in relatively out-of-the-way publications where he spoke more personally, or as the intellectual fire behind his medical and public health writing. But his theological motivations have been there since the beginning, as even his secular biographers notice. Because Farmer was often reluctant to lead with explicitly religious language to mainstream audiences, especially early in his life, the task of situating him theologically—via his various influences and reoccurring themes—becomes all the more important.