Mark Lazenby

Mark Lazenby looks at life’s greatest problems and questions through the eyes of a nurse. After receiving a PhD in philosophy from Boston University, he settled into a philosophy faculty position at a small liberal arts college. During this time, he encountered some of these problems and questions in his father’s long struggle with a neurodegenerative disease and his mother’s difficult death from cancer. He talked with philosophy colleagues at the time, but, according to Lazenby, some could not – and others would not – discuss them. After a year off from his philosophy position to discern how to approach these problems and questions, he decided to become a nurse. He then enrolled in the Yale School of Nursing, where he earned an MSN.

After his MSN studies, he went to the King Hussein Cancer Center in Amman, Jordan, on a Fulbright Research Scholarship to study the spiritual well-being of Arab Muslim and Christian cancer patients. He then returned to Yale, where for nearly a decade he served on the faculties of the Nursing and Divinity Schools and the Council on Middle East Studies at Yale’s McMillan Center for International and Area Studies.

While at Yale, he wrote Caring Matters Most: The Ethical Significance of Nursing (2017) and Toward a Better World: The Social Significance of Nursing (2020). They are the first two books in a trilogy that explores the problems and questions he came to nursing with. He is working on the third book, The World Soul: The Spiritual Significance of Nursing, which is slated to come out at the end of 2021.

While at Yale, he continued his research on the spiritual well-being of cancer patients, focusing on minority religious populations in the United States. His present research centers on spiritually congruent palliative care for Muslims undergoing treatment for advanced cancer at a major urban cancer center.

He has also co-edited a book on spirituality at the end of life and solo-authored a book on the philosophy of religion of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a twentieth-century British philosopher. In addition writing scores and scores of research articles, he has been an invited speaker all over the world, from China to Australia and the United Kingdom to Botswana.

While he lives in Connecticut with his wife, Jodi, and their hound, Pluto – and while his and Jodi’s son goes to university in New York City – he loves the west. He grew up on the desert of Southern California and returns as often as possible to villages on the Pacific Coast of Mexico that he went to as a child with his family.