Dr. Brenda Llewellyn Ihssen

Lecturer in Religion in Antiquity, UWTSD

Biography: Brenda Llewellyn Ihssen is a Lecture in Late Antiquity at the University of Wales Trinity
Saint David (UK) and Associate Professor of Early and Medieval Christian History at Pacific Lutheran
University (USA). She teaches courses in the history of early and medieval Christianity, and specific
topics in historical theology, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and medicine and religion. Her research is
focused primarily on social ethics found in Greek patristic and monastic texts of the late
antique/early Byzantine era. She is the author of “They Who Give From Evil”: the Response of the
Eastern Church to Money-lending in the Early Christian Era (Wipf and Stock, 2012) and John Moschos’
Spiritual Meadow: Authority and Autonomy at the End of the Antique World (Ashgate, 2014). She is
currently working on a translation and history of The Life of St. Stephen the Younger with Dr. Tyler
Travillian.

‘Moves like Jagger: Teaching and Learning with Disability in the Room’

Abstract: Whether encountering a new philosophy or a new patient, we all have to face our
assumptions about religious beliefs and bodies. Relevancy is one avenue by which students might
explore the significance of the past and, in doing so, move beyond a surface notion that history
merely exists to teach us moral lessons. In encountering healing miracles of religious texts, the view
about disability and illness is clear: the presence of the disabled and ill changes the community. But
how is the study of religion and healthcare further impacted by a student’s own understanding of
themselves as ill or disabled?