Respected bioethics scholar Joris Gielen, Ph.D., will present “Religion and Spirituality in End-of-Life Care” at 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 25, in Dr. William P. Alexander Music Center on the PennWest Edinboro campus.

Part of the Dr. James Drane Speaker Series on Religion and Culture, Gielen’s lecture will examine the influence of religion in contemporary healthcare across the globe.

Gielen is an associate professor and director of the Center for Global Health Ethics at Duquesne University. He has contributed to dozens of scholarly articles and book chapters on medical decision making in palliative care.

He earned master’s degrees in history, religious studies and theology from the University of Leuven in Belgium and in Indian philosophy and religion from Banaras Hindu University in India. While earning a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Leuven, he completed a doctoral dissertation on ethical attitudes and religious beliefs among palliative care physicians and nurses in Flanders, Belgium, and New Delhi, India.

Funded by the generosity of the late Dr. James F. Drane, the thought-provoking lecture series provides insight into topics of medicine, morality, science and ethics. Lectures are free and open to the public. The lecture will also be livestreamed on PennWest's YouTube channel.

Drane – a long-tenured Edinboro faculty member, founder of Edinboro’s Bioethics Institute and a foremost authority on religion and bioethics – was named one of the founders of the bioethics discipline at the International Bioethics Conference in Brasilia in 2002. He passed away in April at the age of 93.