Practice & Presence: A Gathering for Christians in Health Care

Devan Stahl is an Associate Professor of Religion and Bioethics at Baylor University. She specializes in bioethics and disability ethics and works as a clinical ethicist consultant for the Baylor, Scott, and White Health System. Her latest book, Disability’s Challenge to Theology: Genes, Eugenics, and the Metaphysics of Modern Medicine (Notre Dame Press) develops a Christian response to genetic technologies using the insights of disability scholars.

John Swinton is Professor in Practical Theology and Pastoral Care and Chair in Divinity and Religious Studies at the University of Aberdeen. For more than a decade he worked as a registered mental health nurse. He also worked for a number of years as a hospital and community mental health Chaplain alongside of people with severe mental health challenges who were moving from the hospital into the community. In 2004, he founded the University of Aberdeen’s Centre for Spirituality, Health and Disability. He has published widely within the area of mental health, dementia, disability theology, spirituality and healthcare, qualitative research and pastoral care. He is the author of a number of monographs including: Becoming Friends of Time: Disability, Timefullness and Gentle Discipleship (Baylor Press 2017), Finding Jesus in the Storm: The spiritual lives of people with mental health challenges. (Eerdmans 2020)  and Dementia: Living in the memories of God (Eerdmans 2012). In 2022 John became chaplain to the Queen of England.

C. Kavin Rowe is the Vice Dean of the Faculty and the George Washington Ivey Distinguished Professor of New Testament. The first of three volumes of his collected essays has recently been published as Leading Christian Communities (Eerdmans, 2023). He is the author of four other books: Christianity’s Surprise: A Sure and Certain Hope (Abingdon, 2020), One True Life: the Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions (Yale University Press, 2016), World Upside Down: Reading Acts in the Graeco-Roman Age (Oxford University Press, 2009, paperback 2010), and Early Narrative Christology (de Gruyter, 2006, repr. Baker Academic, 2009). He has published dozens of articles and essays, and co-edited The Word Leaps the Gap (Eerdmans, 2008) and Rethinking the Unity and Reception of Luke and Acts (University of South Carolina Press, 2010). He is on the editorial board of several international peer-review journals and has also frequently written articles for faithandleadership.com.

Rowe has been a Fulbright Scholar, Regional Scholar for the Society of Biblical Literature, chair of the Society’s Southeastern Region New Testament section, president of the Society’s Southeastern Region, and was elected to the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas. He was awarded a Lilly Faculty Fellowship, a Christian Faith and Life Grant from the Louisville Institute, the John Templeton Prize for Theological Promise, the Paul J. Achtemeier Award, and a Distinguished Scholars grant from the McDonald Agape Foundation.

Wylin Wilson’s work lies at the intersection of religion, gender, and bioethics. Her academic interests also include rural bioethics and Black church studies. Prior to joining Duke Divinity School in 2020, she was a teaching faculty member at the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics and a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School. She has also served as visiting lecturer and research associate at the Harvard Divinity School Women’s Studies in Religion Program. Professor Wilson is the former associate director of Education at the Tuskegee University National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care, and former faculty member in the College of Agriculture, Environment, and Nutrition Sciences at Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, Alabama. Professor Wilson served on the Mount Auburn Hospital Ethics Committee in Cambridge, Mass., the advisory board for the Rural Child Hunger Summit, and as volunteer spiritual care giver for Somerville-Cambridge Elder Services in Somerville, Mass. She is a member of the American Academy of Religion’s Bioethics and Religion Program Unit Steering Committee. Among her publications is her book, Economic Ethics and the Black Church.