Ambiguity and Transcendence in Theology and HealthCategories of health and disease reproduce cultural norms and social structures. Being healthy entails recognition as being a productive member of society, while being sick creates new but equally strict roles. Between these categories lie zones of ambiguity, such as in asymptomatic COVID or chronic pain. People suffering such conditions may seem at once healthy and un-healthy, unable to occupy either the traditional sick role or fit expectations of productivity.Such categories and ambiguities, for both individuals and institutions, are complexified if we consider how religious and theological commitments are entangled with social and familial structures. Theologies challenge and support the healthy and sick body, sometimes simultaneously. Considered from the inside, religion shapes ideals of health, while categories of health and medicine shape religious experience. This panel therefore asks how theology and experiences of health mutually shape each other within the entanglements of faith commitments and familial and social categories.How does the hope of miraculous healing alter the place of disease and the role of the sick in society? Conversely, does faith in divine revelation require a reorganization of human cognitive capacities? What happens to norms of biomedical health providers if we take seriously a theology of fallen humanity? How might resources from within religious traditions be brough to bear on contemporary issues in healthcare and treatment?Chair: Jonathan Zecher (Australian Catholic University)Speakers:Brenda Llewellyn Ihssen (Pacific Lutheran University), Dreaming for Her Daughter in The Miracles of St ArtemiosMarissa Swan (Columbia University), Healing Through Words: Lactantius’ Role as Medicus in the De opificio Dei and the De mortibus persecutorum Shirley Paulson (Independent Scholar), Conversation on a Healing Theology Between Second-Century and Nineteenth Century Texts