Spirit and the Politics of Disablement

Spirit and the Politics of Disablement

Spirit and the Politics of Disablement

Spirit and the Politics of Disablement

Paperback

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Overview

In this remarkable and incisive work, Sharon Betcher analyzes our world and God's embodied presence in the light of her own disability and the insight it affords. She claims disablement as a site of powerful social and religious critique and reflection. With searing honesty, she reveals how our culture, only recently tolerant and supportive of disabled people, still fears them. The presence of disabled persons stands as a rebuke to our images of body and health, to the distorted values of our consumerist culture, and the globalized economy that embodies those values in unjust structures.

Yet, Betcher claims, disablement has also revealed powerful alternative understandings of the body and body politic, in Scripture, in the actions of Jesus, in the healing work of the Spirit at work in the world. Brimming with insight, Betcher's work is a revelation and a bracing challenge to all Christians.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780800662196
Publisher: 1517 Media
Publication date: 11/01/2007
Pages: 264
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.25(d)

About the Author

Sharon V. Betcher is Associate Professor of Theology at Vancouver School of Theology, British Columbia. Ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, she has spoken and written extensively about disability and theology.

Table of Contents


Preface     VII
Introduction: Telling It Slant     1
Part I
The Fear of Falling     25
Monstrosity, Miracle, and Mission: Religion and the Politics of Disablement     48
Medicine Shows: Humanitarianism, Healing, and the Physics of Spirit     68
Putting My Foot (Prosthesis, Crutches, Phantom) Down: Technology as Transcendence     90
Conspicuous Compassion: Race, "Disability" and Salvific Imperialism     105
Part II
A Crip Nation     122
Rumor Mills: Spiritual Practice in the Crip Nation     139
"A Cripple on this Bridge": Thinking Difference, Thinking Differently     159
Never Quite Herself Again: Frida Kahlo's Doctrine of Creation     181
Wisdom to Make the World Go On     194
Endnotes     206
Index     247
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