Patrick Smith: The Art of Shalom
On this episode of Meeting Our Moment, Jeremy Begbie talks to professor Patrick Smith about bioethics, justice and artistry.
Click below (or here) to hear Begbie and Smith’s full, unedited conversation, including a discussion of Jazz-informed ethics.
Patrick Smith
Patrick T. Smith is Associate Research Professor of Theological Ethics and Bioethics at Duke Divinity School and Associate Professor in Population Health Sciences, Duke University Medical School. He’s also a Senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke, and Director of Bioethics Programs at the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities, and History of Medicine at Duke’s School of Medicine. Before coming to Duke, he was a core faculty member at the Center for Bioethics, Harvard Medical School. Smith is especially committed to exploring the close and often forgotten links between the medical world, public health, and social justice. He often considers and applies in his work how Jazz music concepts might inform our approach to ethics. He was named a 2016-17 Henry Luce III Fellow in Theology and was the recipient of the 2019 Paul Ramsey Award for Excellence in Bioethics.
Extras
Excerpted from Jeremy and Patrick’s conversation is an engaging discussion of a Jazz-informed ethic, exploring how concepts such as Call and Response, Syncopation, and Improvisation can help us to perceive and appreciate those “on the margins” and cultivate generative habits.
Learn More
You can learn more about Patrick Smith on his Faculty page. You can read his article, “Why are Questions of Social Justice So Important to the Work of Bioethics?” and view his contribution to Duke Divinity’s Theology Medicine and Culture’s lecture series on Jesus and Medicine, "Agape Love, the Beloved Community, and Our Collective Work in Bioethics.”
In this conversation, Smith recites Langston Hughes poem, “Harlem,” and mentions Toni Morrison’s argument that “in times of dread, artists must never choose to remain silent.” Read Morrison’s full article here. The Wales Window for Alabama, a gift given by the people of Wales in response to the 1963 bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was also discussed.