Faculty Webinar: Eucontamination – Disgust Theology and Psychoanalysis in Practice
This conversation explores Eucontamination as a theological framework for understanding how disgust shapes our inner lives, communities, and responses to difference. Building from their book Eucontamination, Paul and Billie Hoard 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.
Join this webinar to explore theory and practical application, offering ways leaders and communities can work with disgust as it arises around bodies, stories, social difference, and conflict.
Dr. Paul Hoard is a licensed counselor who holds a doctoral degree in Counselor Education and Supervision from Regent University. He completed the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program at the Greater Kansas City Psychoanalytic Institute and he specializes in working with adolescents with sexual behavior problems. A “third culture kid,” he was raised in Ankara, Turkey, and has provided mental health counseling and clinical supervision in the United States, Ukraine, and Turkey. His research and scholarly work draw on Lacanian psychoanalysis and focus on the intersection of perpetration trauma, sexuality, white-body supremacy, and adolescent mental health. An interdisciplinary thinker, he works at the convergence of psychoanalysis, theology, and cultural formation.
Billie Hoard is a trans woman, a high school history teacher, an author, and something of an Anabaptist radical. A consummate generalist, she holds an MA in liberal arts from St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, and she writes on topics ranging from fairy tales and C. S. Lewis to theology and philosophy.