Curriculum Studies in the Age of Covid-19 Stories of the Unbearable

“As a hospital chaplain in the era of Covid-19, Dr. Marla Morris provides care to the souls of patients, paying tribute to their untold stories inevitably marked by inexplicable suffering and sadness. Because such stories cannot be captured in the sterile language of the clinical chart, she turns to such writers as Terry Tempest Williams, John Gunther, and Louise DeSalvo to gain insights into the profound and contradictory experiences of illness she witnesses. But Dr. Morris is not only a chaplain. She is also a curriculum theorist who enacts
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, a way of viewing the world of Covid in deeply personal ways through her relationships with patients, their families, and their caregivers; and in larger sociopolitical, theological, and spiritual spheres. And there’s more: she is also a philosopher who turns to the theoretical frameworks of Derrida, Camus, and Serres among others to explore how their relevance illuminates the pandemic in ways not examined before.
Curriculum Studies in the Age of Covid-19: Stories of the Unbearable
is brilliant, far-reaching scholarship marked by the sensitivity and passion of Dr. Morris, a work that ultimately helps us all honor what she calls in these pages ‘the unbearable stories’ of Covid-19.”
—Delese Wear, PhD, Professor Emerita, Department of Family and Community Medicine, Northeast Ohio Medical University
"Marla Morris has written a book that is a gift for all of us who live at the intersection of medicine, philosophy, literature, and being human. Drawing on an astonishing range of scholarship and an equally astonishing range of lived experience in the middle of the COVID pandemic, Dr. Morris manages to enliven the too-often abstract world of academic reflection on illness and death with clear-eyed witness to the agony at the heart of this crisis. In the evolution of her arguments about unbearable stories, she brings a sophisticated structure for interpretation of these stories in the often-chaotic realm of plague medicine. She does this with the wisdom of an experienced educator, the grace of an experienced chaplain, and the skilled eye of an experienced storyteller. I worked with her in the trenches of a hospital serving thirty-six southern rural counties during the worst of the COVID pandemic. I was grateful for her work as a chaplain in the rooms of our patients and I am ever-grateful to her as a philosopher who has given us a profound way of drilling down on complex lived experiences in this difficult season."
—Raymond Barfield, MD, PhD, Palliative Care Physician, Memorial University Medical Center, Savannah, Georgia; Mercer Medical School, Savannah and Macon, Georgia