Agnostic in an Abbey
Faith Meets Science for Katie Alton ’05 B y E m i l y H a r r i s o n We i r
Mou n t Ho lyo k e Al u m na e Qua r t e r ly
Summer 2007
Kat ie A lton
Prelude The road that led Katie Alton ’05 to spend forty days and forty nights in a Midwestern abbey started at a bioethics conference in Washington, D.C. A month after hearing about a case discussed there, the aspiring physician was still troubled. Doctors couldn’t cure a seriously ill infant, but easing the baby’s pain was possible. However, the baby’s parents declined medical intervention, believing that by watching their child suffer, they were showing faith in God. “I saw this kind of case as a potential problem for me and my future patients,” Alton says. A request like that “would make me angry, because that kind of deep faith didn’t resonate with me at all.”
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