Backhouse Lecture

Backhouse Lecture

Jackie Leach Scully will talk on "God’s ways, not our ways: a dissident Quaker response to disability".  The Backhouse lecture is open to the public, so we encourage you to publicise this event and invite interested family and friends.

Monday 8 July 2024 at 8 pm (Sydney), 7:30 pm (Adelaide)
Zoom link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85232920712
Meeting ID: 852 3292 0712

Jackie asks the question: What might disability, difference and normality mean for Friends in the 21st century?

This is a particularly crucial question today, because for the first time in human history we are developing ways to control what kind of disabilities enter into life, and which don’t. It just isn’t possible to do this responsibly if we haven’t engaged in depth with the spiritual as well as social, moral and political meanings of disability and people with disability.

Until recently, disability has most commonly been approached as a medical problem requiring a medical solution. Over the last half-century an alternative view takes disability as a form of difference where the problem (if there is one) is the mismatch between unusual bodies and the way society is organised. We’re also more aware of disability as an issue of justice and human rights. But none of these perspectives pays much attention to the spiritual encounter with impairment and disability.

In this lecture, Jackie works from personal experience and her professional background as a bioethicist to explore how Friends are called to respond to disability and impairment. She says, as well as taking a look at traditional and contemporary theological engagement with disability and illness, I use the lens of Quaker testimony to offer new light on issues like embodiment, vulnerability and community. I want us to consider how to “think dissidently” as we go about building a world more inclusive of all kinds of difference and diversity.

Jackie Leach Scully is an active Quaker and a previous Swarthmore Lecturer (2002) to Britain Yearly Meeting. With an initial training in biological sciences, she is now resident in Australia and Professor of Bioethics at the University of NSW. She conducts research into how people with disability engage with medical and healthcare innovations. She has been a disability activist for over thirty years.

The Backhouse lectures are delivered annually at Yearly Meeting, the national gathering of Quakers in Australia. These are public lectures on a contemporary issue. Friends from Australia and overseas present these lectures.