Devan Stahl is an Assistant Professor of Bioethics in the Department of Religion at Baylor University. Her research interests include disability ethics, medicine and the visual arts, and theological bioethics. Dr. Stahl’s last book, Imaging and Imagining Illness: Becoming Whole in a Broken Body is an edited volume examining the power of medical images on the experience of chronic illness and disability.

Abstract: Many people will first learn they have an illness through a medical image such as an MRI, but these images often deny the messiness, ambiguities, and the identity of the patient who is represented in them. In this presentation, Devan Stahl explores how medical images have historically revealed the implicit theology of the culture in which they are produced. Today, a growing number of artists with disabilities are transforming their medical images into works of art, which raise deeply theological questions concerning what it means to be embodied and how our bodies relate to a transcendent God.