No rush: The relational time ethic and faith-based medical clinics in the United States

Based on ethnographic interviews with healthcare professionals from faith-based, Christian clinics in the United States, I develop the concept of the "relational time ethic." This ethic refers to the ways that healthcare professionals seek to build relations with patients as persons and to demonstrate their valuing of lives through time expansion. In advancing this ethic, healthcare professionals are in part reflecting on their own well-being but are primarily making moral claims about the high quality of their care and critiquing a bureaucratic time model for healthcare delivery. The on-the-ground intricacies of the relational time ethic further anthropological understandings of the religious justifications for care and critique in biomedicine and bring attention to the ways that time comes to be constructed as an ethical practice in and of itself.