Life is a Gift: Constraints and Liberations

On Friday, March 7, Sara Hendren gave the second lecture in her two-part series here at the Christian Study Center.

Rituals of gift-giving and receiving are global, ancient practices that tell us something important about being human: Not all of life can be organized as transactions or as projects. The gift economy — freely offered goods, graciously received and passed along in a repeating pattern — exceeds those everyday bounds. But when and how might we think about our dependencies, our needs and weaknesses, as gifts? Hendren draws examples from anthropology, history, and design to offer a vision for life as a gift that both liberates our possibilities and constrains our choices.

Sara Hendren is an artist, design researcher, writer, and professor at Northeastern University. Her book What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World explores the places where disability shows up in design at all scales: assistive technology, furniture, architecture, urban planning, and more. It was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR and won the 2021 Science in Society Journalism book prize. Her art and design works have been exhibited on the White House lawn under the Obama presidency, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Seoul Museum of Art, the Vitra Museum, and many others, and her work is held in the permanent collections at MoMA and the Cooper Hewitt. She has been an NEH Public Scholar and a fellow at New America, and her commentary and criticism have been published in Harper’s, Art in America, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere.