Risks of Imagination

Abstract

This essay is inspired by a moment at the conclusion of Julia Watts Belser’s Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole (2023). It takes Belser’s stated desire to “know the sacred through a thousand disabled languages” as an invitation to think about the risks and rewards of imagining the divine in and through others’ differences. It places Belser’s insights in conversation with the author’s own research into mid-twentieth century Catholic engagements with cognitive impairment in the United States, what the essay calls “disability theology before disability theology,” and uses that conversation to return to what have been some enduring impasses in disability studies.

Keywords:

• catholicism
• cognitive disability
• disability studies
• disability theology
• representation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Classifications even more offensive today were popular during this period, including the “R-word.” I’ve chosen not to reproduce that language here (with an exception in the references). For more on classifications of cognitive impairment and the activism that has driven the most recent shifts in vocabulary, see Ford et al. (2013).