journal article
LitStream Collection
Home
doi: 10.1177/0040573620920666pmid: N/A
This article draws on the author’s experience of spinal cord injury to reflect on theological method and central elements of Christian theology. It uses disability theory to unmask the ablest ideology that too often frames church hierarchies and that marginalizes and excludes people with disability and others who are different, notably LGBTQI people of faith. From this perspective, it provides a critical reading of the traditional threefold Christian gospel of perfect creation, fall, and redemption as renewed perfection, arguing that vulnerability, pain, and disability are not a consequence of the fall, but the product of the creative generativity of nature. It tentatively reimagines atonement theory and redemption as a reversal of unjust marginalization (transformative grace for those who experience and perpetrate evil). Finally it considers the transformation of the soul by reference to a disability aesthetic and the truth, goodness, and beauty of God and the diverse creation. It elevates disability as beautiful and desirable, a creative gift of infinite difference.
doi: 10.1177/0040573620920664pmid: N/A
This article defamiliarizes the concept of vocation by attending to one individual’s process of discernment and the issues that that experience and reflection upon it raise for theologies of vocation and the institutions that sustain them. Drawing upon insights from persons with disabilities and disability studies, this article (dis)ables vocation.
doi: 10.1177/0040573620920672pmid: N/A
Many churches today talk about trying to increase diversity in leadership; in some cases this includes seeking to develop more Deaf and disabled leaders. This article is a practical look, from the perspective of a Deaf scholar and practitioner in the field, at what the obstacles might be and how these obstacles might be addressed. It uses models based on Simon Western’s “eco-leadership,” and James Lawrence’s organic model of “growing leaders” to argue that to truly develop more Deaf and disabled leaders, the church needs to reevaluate its own understand of what leadership is, how it is exercised, and how leaders are developed, and concludes that if the church is able to undertake this reevaluation, the mission and ministry of the church will be enabled to flourish in a new and more positive way.
doi: 10.1177/0040573620920676pmid: N/A
Services of healing and wholeness need to be reimagined so that they better represent various experiences of disability. This article begins with a brief historical survey of the ways in which healing services and anointings have been understood in the Christian tradition. While far from exhaustive, this history reveals the Christian notion of healing to be contentious and evolving. Next, I analyze how these historical understandings have come to shape the ways Christians understand disabilities in our modern culture as well as the mechanism by which healing is carried out. Finally, I provide tips for constructing non-ableist services of healing and wholeness.
doi: 10.1177/0040573620920673pmid: N/A
As a disabled person, Psalm 139:13–14 has long presented as theologically problematic for me. How could “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well” fall as praise from my lips when as young as six years old I realized I was differently abled; and that with all of the shameful, negative connotations assumed with being so. The theological narrative about disability centered on sins of the mother, shame of the family, pity of the public, and sympathetically low expectations for achieving, excelling, and fitting into mainstream ableism. This article weaves biographical vignettes and theological reflections to develop a liberation hermeneutic for creating a narrative theology of disability in the church; challenges commonly held perceptions about disabled personhood; examines familiar efforts to enhance the worship experience for disabled persons; admonishes practices which inconvenience or otherwise undermine a disabled parishioner; and examines the efficacy of ministry accommodations to equip disabled persons to worship, serve, and lead in the church.
doi: 10.1177/0040573620920667pmid: N/A
This paper builds on Frances Young’s suggestion that people with profound intellectual disability have a prophetic vocation. It explores the idea of vocation using the experience of intellectual disability as a critical hermeneutic that brings to the fore a perspective that views vocation as something that includes all of the Body of Christ and not just the head. The intention is to offer a different more theologically and practically inclusive perspective on vocation that might enable us to create communities where each member's vocation was valued and enabled.
doi: 10.1177/0040573620920698pmid: N/A
Drawing on ethnographic research, Scripture, and theology, this article posits that Christian arguments for inclusion with people with disabilities often fail to undermine ideologies of normalcy lurking at the heart of redemption. By reading the healing of blind Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46–52) with the pitfalls of inclusion and current research in mind, I follow theologian Sharon V. Betcher in challenging readers to resist making disabled persons but “plot props” in able-bodied enlightenment, and let Jesus’ ministry direct us to Bartimaeus’ ministry in the text. I argue that in uplifting the faith and leadership of Bartimaeus, Jesus points to Bartimaeus as the protagonist, inviting us to perceive and receive the faithfulness and leadership of people with disabilities in their seeming disruptions and evident differences. In order to aid able-bodied people in apprehending the leadership of persons with disabilities, I draw on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of disabled “misfitting,” a feminist materialist notion of disability that emphasizes the importance of context and materiality in disablement. Using the concept of misfitting to analyze ethnographic examples calls attention to the opportunities and possibilities created in disabled people’s leadership and challenges congregations to consider where their paradigms of leadership may still be oriented around ideologies of normalcy and practices of able-bodied inclusion. Indeed, congregations are invited to receive the work of the Spirit in persons with disabilities by entering into dignifying dialogue with new forms of ministry and leadership.
Showing 1 to 10 of 15 Articles