Spirit and the politics of disablement

✍ Scribed by Sharon V. Betcher

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 265
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Preface (page vii)
Introduction: Telling It Slant (page 1)
Part I
Chapter 1: The Fear of Falling (page 25)
Chapter 2: Monstrosity, Miracle, and Mission: Religion and the Politics of Disablement (page 48)
Chapter 3: Medicine Shows: Humanitarianism, Healing, and the Physics of Spirit (page 68)
Chapter 4: Putting My Foot (Prosthesis, Crutches, Phantom) Down: Technology as Transcendence (page 90)
Chapter 5: Conspicuous Compassion: Race, "Disability," and Salvific Imperialism (page 105)
Part II
Chapter 6: A Crip Nation (page 122)
Chapter 7: Rumor Mills: Spiritual Practice in the Crip Nation (page 139)
Chapter 8: "A Cripple on this Bridge": Thinking Difference, Thinking Differently (page 159)
Chapter 9: Never Quite Herself Again: Frida Kahlo's Doctrine of Creation (page 181)
Chapter 10: Wisdom to Make the World Go On (page 194)
Endnotes (page 206)
Index (page 247)