While our secular age seems to stymie pastors, surgeons like Kalanithi are awakening to the pastoral task as central and transformational. The invitation to share in the depth of human experience, to enter into the reality of death, seems to bring an overwhelming sense of transcendence within the most immanent of occupations.

These people with health-care talents had never studied biochemistry or pathology, but they possessed the

Because the brain mediates our experience of the world, any neurosurgical problem forces a patient and family, ideally with a doctor as a guide, to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?