Event Details

This conversation explores Eucontamination as a theological framework for understanding how disgust shapes our inner lives, communities, and responses to difference. Building from my book Eucontamination, I argue that disgust is not merely an emotional reflex but a formative moment that reveals what we fear, what we exclude, and what we imagine holiness to be. Eucontamination names a counter-movement—an openness to what unsettles—that mirrors the pattern found in the life of Jesus, who consistently inverted the logic of disgust. Rather than reinforcing boundaries between clean and unclean, pure and impure, Jesus moved toward lepers, the bleeding woman, sinners, and the marginalized, contaminating the very categories meant to keep him separate. His ministry reveals that transformation often occurs precisely where disgust would have us withdraw.

Lacanian psychoanalysis provides helpful tools for understanding why disgust feels so potent—how fantasies of purity organize identity, and how desire is tangled with what we reject. These insights illuminate the psychological scaffolding beneath our theological impulses without replacing them. The psychoanalytic lens clarifies the human dynamics; the theological imagination gives them meaning.

The talk moves from conceptual framing to practical application, offering ways leaders and communities can work with disgust as it arises around bodies, stories, social difference, and conflict. Eucontamination becomes a guide for inhabiting the difficult spaces where aversion and grace meet—inviting a way of being that mirrors Jesus’ disruptive proximity and opens the possibility of healing, truth, and renewed belonging.