Sacramental Preaching in the Culture of Ableism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1 Eunjoo Mary Kim, Preaching the Presence of God: A Homiletic From an Asian American Perspective (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1999).

2 Lizette Larson-Miller, Sacramentality Renewed: Contemporary Conversations in Sacramental Theology (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2016), 4–6.

3 Eunjoo Mary Kim, Preaching in an Age of Globalization (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), 20–25.

4 Paul Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Context (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 72.

5 Disabled World, “Disability Statistics,” https://www.disabled-world.com/disability/statistics/.

6 Disabled World, “Recent US Disability Statistics from the Census Bureau,” https://www.disabled-world.com/disability/statistics/census-stats.php.

7 As I elaborated in Christian Preaching and Worship in Multicultural Contexts (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2017), 21–29, the term culture does not have one fixed meaning. When I use the term culture to describe the social reality of ableism, I include not only individual perception, but also collective behavior, social habits, systems, beliefs, and values.

8 Stop Ableism, “Ableism History,” http://www.stopableism.org/p/ableism-history.html.

9 Mental Health America, “Preventing Suicide in Older Adults,” http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/preventing-suicide-older-adults.

10 Kevin Caruso, “Elderly Suicide,” suicide.org., http://www.suicide.org/elderly-suicide.html.

11 According to the holiness code of priests in Leviticus 21:18ff (NRSV), anyone “blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long, or one who has a broken foot or a broken hand, or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a blemish in his eyes…” is prohibited from the priestly activities of bringing offerings to God or entering the most holy place in the temple.

12 Nancy L. Eiesland uses “the disabled God” as the title of a book in which she elaborates a theology of disability. See The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994); cf. Tim Basselin, “Why Theology Needs Disability,” Theology Today 68, no. 1 (2011): 47–57.

13 Cf., Ruthanna B. Hooke, “The Spirit-Breathed Body: Divine Presence and Eschatological Promise in Preaching,” in Toward a Homiletical Theology of Promise, ed. David Schnasa Jacobsen (Eugene: Cascade, 2018), 61.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eunjoo Mary Kim

Eunjoo Mary Kim, professor of homiletics and liturgics, Iliff School of Theology, Denver, Colorado.