UPenn Lecture: Existential Scarcity: Debt and Ideals of 'Natural' Reproduction

Here’s a video of the lecture I gave on March 22, 2019 at the University of Pennsylvania, hosted by the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture. I spoke on how the generation of interest and the generation of children have been conflated and compared at different points in history in various theological and philosophical systems. Maybe one way to resist the onslaught and power of debt in society today is to tease out and separate these interconnections, and undercut the associations between debt and reproduction.

The Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture presented a special Philosophy of Finance lecture featuring Professor Devin Singh, Assistant Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College, on March 22, 2019. The lecture explored how understandings of debt and interest are bound up with assumptions about what counts as reproduction, and how both interest and reproduction reflect anxieties about the scarcity of life and resources.