Brian Brock

Autism, Care, and Christian Hope

This article takes a Christian theological approach to autism to re-narrate the relationship of carers for individuals with autism. The discussion displays concrete ways that our care for those with autism is reshaped by being set within ontologies that privilege engaged self-investment, within a cultural context that rarely transcends its desire to study phenomenon through highly self-aware and disengaged description. Also presented is a phenomenological exploration of the challenges for carers by the experience of caring for those with autism, and the article concludes by entering a theological debate about how best to conceive our relationship to them.

Theologizing Inclusion: 1 Corinthians 12 and the Politics of the Body of Christ

Contemporary disability theologians have increasingly lighted on 1 Corinthians chapter 12 as a classic biblical depiction of what is today known as an inclusive social model. This article traces theological attempts to define the concept of inclusion and advance that emerging consensus by offering a close reading of 1 Cor. chapter 12. St. Pauls famous “body life” chapter offers a conceptually rich and theologically sophisticated account of the spiritual gifts suggesting that every member of the church is to be understood as an active giver or conduit of divine love, a giving that is not reducible to any persons supposed physiological or intellectual deficiencies, nor the supposed gift of people with disabilities to serve as reminders that we are all destined to be dependent on others. The ecclesial discernment being proposed if Christians are to receive the gifts of all members of the Christian community depends on learning to look beyond the sociological and demographic certainties typically attached to individual congregants.

Quality of Life and the Statistical Outlier: On Caring in an Industrialized Age

To excavate the different contemporary meanings of the term quality of life, this study queries the role of communication in diagnosis and treatment, especially of mentally disabled patients. It addresses the relative weightings given in medicine today to the stories told by patients about their health (the communicative aspect of the physician-patient relationship), to the body of the patient (the Hippocratic tradition of listening to the body), and the modern tradition of medicine as observing and altering bodily parts (the systemic view of health care). Empirical evidence is surveyed that indicates barriers to responsive healthcare delivery to people with severe learning difficulties are not simply infrastructural problems but are intrinsically related to the contemporary configuration of medical knowledge. The discussion concludes by indicating how—if the dilemmas generated by modern medical institutions are an artifact of the self-definition of the actors within them—the Christian tradition can be understood to offer a rival mode of knowing the body that revives listening as a constitutive aspect of medical caring.

Looking at “Us”, Attending to “Them”, Seeking the Divine: Revisiting Disability in the Christian Tradition

This article responds to the reflections on Disability in the Christian Tradition that are collected in this journal issue, especially those of Amos Yong, Deborah Beth Creamer, Elizabeth Antus, Willie James Jennings, and John Goldingay. It discusses some of the metatheoretical issues at stake as these scholars attempt to allow thinkers from the past shape their own contemporary thinking, and it indicates some of the reasons why this type of engagement might be understood to play an important role in attempts to renew contemporary practice.

The Capacity Contract: Intellectual Disability and the Question of Citizenship.: Stacy Clifford Simplican. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). ix + 182 pp. Paperback,

mental illness, but reading her story offers a glimpse into life with mental illness and through that story one may learn how to be better at providing pastoral care. Coleman does not offer a theology of mental illness, but a faith expression of a woman living with mental illness and one may find help in the expression of one’s own faith while living with mental illness. This is an important work which reaches out to African American communities but does not need to be limited to the African American community. This book may be of interest to friends, family members, and people in faith communities (regardless of cultural backgrounds) who would like to learn what it is like to struggle with faith and mental illness. It may be used to stimulate discussion for members of faith communities who wish to support people who live with mental illness. Finally, Coleman’s work may be used in a variety of academic settings, at the undergraduate level in a religion and disability course, or at the graduate level in a pastoral care or cultural responses to mental illness course.

25 pp. ISBN, 978-0-8166-9403-7.

ABSTRACT The author offers a robustly theological account of compassion, highlighting its bodily nature. Divine mercy is presented as being conveyed through human bodies to remake and enliven both the human agent and recipient. Culminating in a story of a physically and mentally impaired runner, this account of mercy and compassion fleshes out Gods mercy, which can be understood as flowing through human bodies in the context of sporting activities. A challenge is thus levied at modern secularized accounts of compassion and mercy, as well as many of the dominant values in contemporary sport—flawless athletic beauty, agonistic competition, and financial success—which have rendered simple acts of intercompetitive compassion and mercy nearly unintelligible.

Embodying Compassion: Disability Sport and the Mercy of God

Mental disability exposes in an especially acute manner some important deficiencies in modern healthcare practices. This paper offers an account of the reasons why the deviation of the disabled from the statistical norm creates such problems for modern medical expertise. Contemporary medical science exhibits features of modern techniques and mindsets which are characteristic of late-modernity and deeply shape a wide range of human-creature interactions. I By fleshing out how this modern adherence to a suite of techniques shapes the configurations of medical knowledge a better understanding of the difficulties the mentally disabled face in modern healthcare settings will emerge. Substantiating this analysis by way of a recent empirical study the paper will propose some of the strategies for a caring resistance to these problems such an analysis might suggest to Christians today. The analysis as a whole indicates why solidarity with the disabled in the modern developed world draws Christians into various forms of political resistance to the powers of the age.

Parenting as political resistance: Disability and “dealing with” late-modern medicine

This paper explores the role of divine speaking in Christian ethics, critically engaging with the tendency in modern evangelicalism to seek to derive moral principles from Scripture or a biblically-derived ontology, often via deployment of map-making metaphors. The paper sets out the rather different centrality of the divine claim found in biblical accounts of good or righteous human action. Drawing on the criticisms of the anthropologist Tim Ingold of what he calls the “map-making fallacy,” the paper concludes by suggesting the methodological importance of understanding the orientation of the Christian life to be a fundamentally grounded in interpersonal responsivity.