Disability at the Heart of Theology: On Marginality, Method, and Overcoming “Best-Case Anthropologies”

Abstract

Disability in the Christian Tradition breaks new ground by fruitfully exploring the Christian tradition's positive contributions to theological understandings of disability. However, examination of how contemporary authors retrieve traditional insights shows two divergent methods: Some authors prefer to enfold disabled people into a pre-existent anthropology that still presupposes an “ideal” functioning of body and mind, while others explicitly rethink anthropological categories from looking first at the lives of such people and then foregrounding limitation and vulnerability. The following article both demonstrates why the latter option may ultimately provide more traction while suggesting ways to improve it.

KEYWORDS:

• Brian Brock
• John Swinton
• disability
• theological anthropology

Acknowledgments

The term best-case anthropologies is the language used in the introduction to the text reviewed here (Brock, 2012b, p. 1).