![[Past event] Disability, Technology, and Human Flourishing with Dr. Eleanor McLaughlin](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/594177a115d5db3fbb9999bc/1611610672304-JE3LMBLYJU7NXLY5HJJH/McLaughlin.jpg)
Online Lecture, March 12th, 2021 at 12:30pm Pacific Standard Time
Dr. Eleanor McLaughlin, Programme Leader for the Postgraduate Programmes in Theology, Imagination and Culture, Sarum College, will assess the role of technology for human flourishing of people with disabilities in two steps. First, she defines human flourishing as depending in large part on our relationships with others, suggesting that, despite Christian theology's historical failure to understand this relational core of human flourishing, evidenced by the church's supporting the us/them divide between people with and without disabilities, there are nevertheless resources within theology that can help overcome this divide, and thus strengthen relationships between all people. Drawing on Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s idea that in the biblical Genesis narrative the limit given to Adam and Eve symbolises God’s grace to humans, and on Deborah Creamer’s ‘limitness’ model in disability theology, McLaughlin will propose an important distinction between our ontological limitedness, and our encounter with specific limits that prevent us from flourishing.
McLaughlin will employ this distinction between ontological limitedness and specific limits in assessing the value of technological enhancement for disabled persons. This distinction allows an evaluation of technology which is positive when technology’s role is to help us overcome specific limits preventing us from flourishing (particularly in helping us build relationships with others), but which is negative when technology seeks to eradicate the ontological limitness which gives us the potential to experience God’s grace in our embodied life.
This lecture is part of the series Human Flourishing in a Technological Age, with lectures from John Behr, Thomas Fuchs, and others. Click here to see all the lecture titles and dates.
The event series is sponsored by the Issachar Fund in collaboration with Regent College, and presented by the Human Flourishing: A Christian Perspective project, which is directed by Prof. Jens Zimmermann and Dr. Michael Burdett.
Please contact us with any questions.
See more about Prof. McLaughlin and read more about the Human Flourishing project.
*Note: this live lecture is only available remotely via Zoom.