This conversation between TMC co-director Farr Curlin, MD and Christopher Tollefsen, PhD explores how Christians can make sense of medicine's responses to different forms of human suffering. What can be received as a gift? And how do uses of medicine that ignore medicine’s limits hinder persons’ capacity to flourish despite their suffering?

Join TMC co-director Farr Curlin, M.D. and Ekaterina Lomperis, Ph.D., to discuss her recent book. In it, Lomperis looks to recover Martin Luther’s little-studied theology of medicine, arguing that Luther prized the proper use of medicine as a divinely preferred means of actively resisting bodily suffering. Curlin and Lomperis will explore how this early modern “reformation of healing” might inform contemporary practices of medicine and efforts to reform those practices.

Where death was once something that simply “happened” to us, advances in medicine now require us to make choices about how and when we die—and we often do so bereft of cultural or religious guidance. Dr. Travis Pickell traces the roots of this “burdened agency” and proposes alternatives drawn from Christian theology and practice. This conversation between Pickell and TMC Associate Director Brett McCarty will explore what this account offers both to those facing death and to those who accompany them.