Thinking about profound disability is being ever deepened by refinements to key principles such as inclusion, friendship, belonging, missing the presence of the disabled person, acceptance, and human rights. This article adds the principle of participation to this thinking. Participation can be understood in two ways: first as joining in, in which both common understandings and the principles of Catholic Social Teaching demonstrate that participation, especially in liturgical practice, goes beyond notions of citizenship or the requirements of justice or rights of people with disabilities. Second, and, more significantly for people with profound disabilities, participation as being engaged highlights that the disabled witness to understanding worship as God's work. Moreover liturgy and worship are not only about bringing needs and desires into God's presence: they are about bringing the self.
In Good Blood, Bad Blood, David Smith and Michael Wehmeyer painstakingly weave together the complex histories of psychologist Henry Herbert Goddard, the Vineland Training School and their influence...
The author of this article constructs a response to Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader (Brock & Swinton, 2012) from the working context of teaching a course on “Disability, Ethics, and Theology” at a Jesuit Catholic university. She explores the usefulness of the volume for the course and anticipates a possible response from her students, as well as highlighting theological insights from select theologians. Interspersed throughout the article are suggestions for how the book might enhance theological reflection in the current course.
The article reflects on the significance of Disability in the Christian Tradition in light of the experience of a 43 year relationship with someone who had multiple sclerosis and was eventually totally disabled and mentally impaired.
Chronic pain has received little attention within the academic study of disability and religion. This is a significant loss not only because pain is a common embodied experience but also because reflection on pain offers valuable challenges to existing models of disability: pain does not connect neatly to advocacy work and does not fit well within social and minority understandings of disability, and even medical understandings of pain are inadequate. This essay reflects on pain as a source of knowledge and a way of knowing that is relevant for theological and ethical reflection, particularly within disability and embodiment theologies.
This article proposes to explore new ways of speaking about disability by drawing from the theology of Johann Baptist Metz. Specifically, it uses Metz's ideas of subjectivity, narrative, memory, and hope and applies them to mental illness, with the intent to enable theologians to respond to mental health issues in a more nuanced way and to encourage Christians to foster a deeper solidarity with those suffering from mental illness. The article then briefly considers how Metz's paradigm may be used to enhance our understanding of other categories of disability.
This article responds to the reflections on Disability in the Christian Tradition that are collected in this journal issue, especially to those by Thomas E. Reynolds, Sarah Melcher, Willie James Jennings, Emily Stetler, and M. J. Iozzio. Moreover, this response explores the nature of time and lays out a rationale for taking seriously theological perspectives from across the ages. The discussion lays out an Augustinian perspective on time within which the revelation of God in history is perceived as unbounded by time, and within which the communion of saints offers new possibilities for the theology of disability.
This article reflects on Brian Brock and John Swinton's Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader (2012), noting its groundbreaking contribution to the study of bodies in the Christian tradition. This article considers the problem of historiography illumined by this text and the absence of colonialism as an aspect of periodization and post-colonial thought as a lens through which to analyze disability.
This article considers the potential contribution to theology and disability studies of the life work of Sister Thea Bowman, an African American Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration, a Faulkner scholar, an educator par excellence, and a woman of spirit, song, and dance. I propose that Bowman offers a liturgical key to accepting difference and overcoming divisions. I explore two works in particular, her introduction to the first African American Catholic Hymnal and her address to the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, to see the change that liturgy can make in Catholic faith communities.
Among different possible ways of sanctification, the Roman Catholic Church proposes consecrated life to the faithful: devoting life to God, committing oneself to follow Christ with Holy Spirit's help. Can a Catholic person with disabilities be accepted into an institute of consecrated life? The present code of Canon Law requires sufficient healthy and mature candidates. As every institute has its own rules, these requirements may be more or less strict. Finally, every disability is different and entails specific constraints for these persons and their entourage. Some faithful persons with disabilities never find a religious institute, whereas others are welcomed with their disability. At these welcoming institutes, the disability is not taken as a problem to solve, but instead as a community project. It is possible for people with disabilities in standard institutes and also in places especially founded to allow people with disabilities—mental included—to devote their life to the Lord. They can live in community with able-bodied people. KEYWORDS: canon lawconsecrated lifeproject Notes 1. Expert opinion is only required in particularly difficult cases and with the free consent of the interested party (Instruction Renovationis causam 11, III, 06/01/1969). See also the commentary of Canon 642 (Caparros, Thériault, & Thorn, 1999). 2. As noted in Canon 220, "No one is permitted to harm illegitimately the good reputation which a person possesses nor to injure the right of any person to protect his or her own privacy." 3. The term experts here refers to medical experts, while respecting confidentiality and private life, according to Canon 220. 4. Thus, an institute is handicapped if the average age of its members is too high, and if it chooses not to welcome young members, valid because of the too-important difference in age such that these members could not spread completely in their vocation. Thus the institute chooses to die. 5. Not accepts, however, since the disability always remains unacceptable. 6. Agreeing on the handicap does not mean accepting it—it is always unacceptable. Agree means moving with the handicap, subscribing to the project that God has for the person and that passes by the disability. 7. Also, to detect, for example, a problem that is not perceived any more in the community, due to the lack of distance.
This article highlights how Disability in the Christian Tradition helps open important reconsiderations of traditions of theology in light of disability. It focuses on two themes. In the first instance, it explores the contours of the past's relation with the present as it is expressed generally in the volume. In the second, the article interrogates theological anthropology in light of disability, questioning whether Christian theology attends adequately to disability by foregrounding human worth “outside” of disability and by treating it in isolation from its intersection with other features of embodied life, such as race, sexuality, gender, and class.
In the Book of Job, one finds a classic example of a person moving from able-bodied privilege to disability by means of a debilitating disease. This series of tragedies causes Job to become an outcast, alienated from his family and friends, and relegated to the outskirts of society. Throughout the Book of Job, one encounters some of the religious stereotypes regarding suffering, disease, and disability common to the Hebrew Bible, which relate to the many stereotypes and misguided perspectives that people with disabilities in today's society have to face—religion and theology quite often playing a negative role in transmitting and sustaining such harmful views. In the Book of Job, however, one also sees glimpses of a counter narrative that moves toward a new kind of speech regarding disability and theology, particularly with regard to what it means to be human. These glimpses of an alternative way of speaking about theology and disability serve as encouragement in our own journey to find different a kind of (theological) speech rooted in values such as human dignity, inclusion, and hospitality.
This article has its motivation in the experience of its author who, following a serious accident, was rendered a quadriplegic. It explores the potential contribution of the virtue tradition to the happiness of people with a spinal-cord injury. Drawing on the philosophical insights of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Alistair MacIntyre, it connects the virtue tradition to the more recent psychological science of positive psychology, and shows how the emerging conception of happiness can speak to the challenge of living with an acquired disability. It identifies the impact of spinal cord injury on a person's capacity to experience bodily pleasure, but goes on to argue that the pursuit of meaning and the exercise of virtue enables a more substantive happiness—better understood as well-being. It concludes by identifying some of the virtues needed to negotiate dependence on carers while, at the same time, achieving as much independence as possible.
This article explores the tensions between our subjectivity and our status as embodied and limited beings, specifically in relation to Deborah Creamer's Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities (2009). Moreover, this article aims to supplement and expand on Creamer's “model of limits” by arguing for a stronger attentiveness to the radically disruptive potential of our embodied limits. It also claims that such an attentiveness helps us to recognize two points at which Creamer overextends herself: (1) the claim that we are able to determine for ourselves what our individual limits are, and (2) the claim that we able to draw on our limits to creatively construct an image of God as similarly limited.
Painters and illustrators are good observers and exegetes of biblical texts. This article points to the exegetical relevance of Bible illustrations by non-professional illustrators who are handicapped by an intellectual disability or by behavioral problems. Special attention is given to the sociological and hermeneutical phenomenon of persons living in a secular environment with only scarce contact to a Christian church. Some of these handicapped persons show strong reactions when they hear a Bible story. Their unconventional illustrations are precious contributions noteworthy for nonspecialists and specialists. This article will present and discuss illustrations made by a Swiss adult and a child relating to two stories of the Old Testament: Jacob's dream about the ladder to heaven (Genesis 28) and Israel's wandering in the wilderness (Exodus).
This article responds to the reflections on Disability in the Christian Tradition that are collected in this journal issue, especially those of Amos Yong, Deborah Beth Creamer, Elizabeth Antus, Willie James Jennings, and John Goldingay. It discusses some of the metatheoretical issues at stake as these scholars attempt to allow thinkers from the past shape their own contemporary thinking, and it indicates some of the reasons why this type of engagement might be understood to play an important role in attempts to renew contemporary practice.
