Online
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For Students
General Audience
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During this conversation, TMC co-director Farr Curlin, MD, will sit down with Christopher Tollefsen, PhD, to discuss their joint work on suffering and the limits of medicine. Rather than take up the questions of theodicy, Curlin and Tollefsen will explore the character of suffering and the challenges of responding to it well. In particular, the conversation will explore how Christians can make sense of what medicine does well in response to different forms of human suffering, which can be received as a gift, and distinguish that from uses of medicine that ignore medicine’s limits and hinder persons’ capacity to suffer well—to flourish in ways possible despite their suffering.
Farr Curlin, M.D.
Josiah C. Trent Professor of Medical Humanities & TMC Co-Director
Farr Curlin, M.D., is Josiah Trent Professor of Medical Humanities in the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, & History of Medicine and Co-Director of the Theology, Medicine and Culture Initiative (TMC) at Duke University. Dr. Curlin has worked to bring attention to the intersection of medicine, ethics, and theology. In 2012 he helped to found both the University of Chicago’s Program on Medicine and Religion and the annual Conference on Medicine and Religion. Since 2015, through Duke Divinity School’s TMC Initiative, he and colleagues have brought graduate theological training to those with vocations to health care. Starting in 2023, Dr. Curlin also is working with colleagues across North America to develop the Hippocratic Society, an association of students and practitioners dedicated to fulfilling the profession to heal. He is co-author, with Chris Tollefsen, of The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession (Notre Dame University Press, 2021), as well as more than 150 articles and book chapters addressing the moral and spiritual dimensions of medical practice.
Chrisopher Tollefsen, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy and McCausland Chair in Civic Engagement; Executive Director, Center for American Civic Leadership and Public Discourse, University of South Carolina
Christopher Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy and the Peter McCausland Chair in Civic Engagement at the University of South Carolina. He has published over 125 articles in journals and edited collections, and a similar number of popular essays in venues such as Public Discourse, First Things, and National Review. He is the author of Lying and Christian Ethics and Killing and Christian Ethics, and is co-author of The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession (with Dr. Farr Curlin) and Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (with Robert P. George). In 2019-20, he served as a Commissioner on the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights. He has twice been a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University, and in 2024-25 was a Visiting Fellow at the DeNicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame. He is the Executive Director of the South Carolina Center for American Civic Leadership and Public Discourse.