CANCELLED: “Saved by Grace through Pharma? Medicine, the Gospel, and the Quest for Eternal Life.”

Editor’s note: This event has been cancelled as part of Duke University’s new policy that became effective March 10, 2020 in response to COVID-19.  Visit Duke’s COVID-19 response site for the most up-to-date information and policies for the university at https://coronavirus.duke.edu/.

The Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative is hosting a public panel entitled, Saved by Grace through Pharma? Medicine, the Gospel, and the Quest for Eternal Life, featuring panelists Kavin Rowe, Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School, and Bradley Gregory, Associate Professor of Biblical Studies at the Catholic University of America. The conversation will be moderated by Farr Curlin, MD, Professor of Medical Humanities at Duke Divinity School.

This is the fourth conference of our five-part, “Out of Our Meds? Theology and Pharmaceuticals,” series supported by the McDonald Agape Foundation. The 2020 conference theme is: ‘Do not be anxious about your body:’ How is medical management of risks to future health compatible with Christian discipleship?” In this conversation, we will venture beyond psychiatry into broader theological engagement of the use of pharmaceuticals for risk reduction.  Drawing on scripture and Christian tradition, we will ask:  How do we live into the truth that God cares for us and for our bodies in the face of anxiety about risk of future disease, death, or disability?  How might such medicalized anxiety respond to the truth that we do not have the power to secure our future?  How does it enable or hinder us from serving the God who gives us our bodies and their health?

We will ask what it might look like for patients and clinicians to apply the exhortation to seek first the is kingdom of God, and to not be anxious about tomorrow. We will ask what it might look like for medicine to respect Jesus’s maxim:  Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.