Synopsis

The 2024 Backhouse Lecture was delivered by Jackie Leach Scully on Monday, July 8th 2024 in Adelaide, Australia. Jackie has been involved with Quakers for over 40 years, and has been variously an Attender, Member, Meeting Clerk, and Yearly Meeting Clerk in England, Switzerland, Germany, and now Australia. In 2002, she gave the annual Swarthmore Lecture to Britain Yearly Meeting, “Playing in the Presence: Genetics, Ethics, and Spirituality.” Jackie first trained as a molecular biologist, later moving her focus to bioethics and medical ethics.

Disability has shaped her family, career, personal, and professional life, and her engagement with faith and spirituality. Drawing on her personal and professional experience, Jackie looks at traditional and contemporary theological engagement with disability. She uses Quaker testimony to explore how Friends are called to respond to disability and impairment and shares some “dissident thinking” about disability with Australian Friends, and others, to help build a world more inclusive of all kinds of difference and diversity.