You Tube Theology

This seminar took place on 24 October 2019, 4.30-6pm in Seminar Room B (D/TH004, Dept. of Theology & Religion, Abbey House, DH1 3RS, Durham) ABSTRACT: How do religious people negotiate the experience of the fertility clinic? While many people find the experience of infertility unsettling to their sense of self, those who identify as religious additionally have to engage both the clinical setting which frequently seems indifferent to their religious concerns, as well as their own faith tradition which may have thought very little about the medical technologies of infertility. Based on extensive interviews with lay religious people who have first-hand experience of new reproductive and genetic technologies, this paper considers both the nature of their encounter with the clinic and the moral reasoning they use to handle medicalised infertility. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ BIOGRAPHY: I am Professor of Theological Ethics in the Department of Theology and Religion. My research and teaching has covered many areas of Christian moral and social thought, including political theology, bioethics, sexual ethics, and the ethics of technology. Within bioethics and medical ethics, my research has focussed on theological approaches to new reproductive and genetic technologies. While some of this concentrates on detailed moral questions surrounding stem cell research, the status of the embryo, the Human Genome Project, transgenic animals, Body Integrity Identity Disorder, and so on, my overriding concern has been to situate such questions within a broader intellectual and cultural context. In particular I have tried to relate contemporary Western attitudes to the body, and to medical interventions in the body, to the legacy of the seventeenth-century revolution in thought and practice and its rejection of Aristotelian and theological modes of thought. My teaching includes the MA module Theology, Ethics and Medicine (currently not being offered), and research students past and present include many working in areas relating to theology and health.