Skin in the game: Toward a Christological and death-focused model of disability

Abstract

What is disability? Three major models are historically foundational to the social understanding of disability in the Western world: understanding disability as deficiency, scientific/medical understandings, and postmodern identity and social politics. The author traces the development of these various models (heavily influenced from the historic work of Henri-Jacques Stiker) alongside the fundamental ethic each illustrates. As will be shown in the modern reporting on a specific instance of disability, the current social understanding is rooted in an amalgamation of these historic models. Likewise, this case study illustrates not only where the current field of disability theology is flawed, but also from where a new model may emerge. Interrogating the embodiment of the person in question—a young boy with a unique skin composition—in conversation with pain, the flesh/body conception of Sharon Betcher, and second-person intersubjective theological anthropology, points to a new level of discourse on disability, death, and Christology.

Keywords:

• anthropology
• disability studies
• ethics
• physical disability
• suffering