Thomas E. Reynolds

Theology and Disability: Changing the Conversation

This article suggests that faith communities need to change the way disability is conceived and talked about in order to more fulsomely welcome people with disabilities as participants in community life. Speaking from the context of parenting a child with disabilities, the author indicates ways the conversation needs to move beyond depicting disability as a bodily deprivation or problem to be cured or done away with, beyond the able-disabled binary that pits a normal “inside” against an “outside” in need of normalization, and beyond mere inclusive “accommodation” to disability as an access issue. As the conversation shifts, disability might become received as a matter of human difference rather than deviance, and accordingly, received as gift, one that disrupts and preempts easy closures, but in the end opens new transformative possibilities for being vulnerably human together in mutual relation.

Love without Boundaries Theological Reflections on Parenting a Child with Disabilities

Reflecting on the authors experience of parenting a son with disabilities and bringing this experience into conversation with authors such as Jean Vanier, Paul Ricoeur, and Emmanuel Levinas, this article suggests that “letting go” and becoming open to another in love is an experience of redemption that marks a conversion of self, one that transgresses boundaries and empowers the deepest kind of mutual belonging imaginable. Moreover, this conversion to another ultimately transforms us in the direction of a conversion to the divine itself, cultivating dispositions of gratitude and hope, for God is the relational power of the whole of reality, that which makes love imaginable, indeed possible.

Toward a Wider Hospitality: Rethinking Love of Neighbour in Religions of the Book

This article argues that because hospitality—the gesture of welcoming the stranger—is a way of expressing the love found in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions, it can provide a pivotal point from which a shared ethic of reciprocity can emerge. Hospitality is a bestowal of welcome that opens toward another as loved by God. But in the transaction a strange reversal occurs. The host who initially offers a gift to the guest ends up becoming blessed by the guest, receiving the presence of God. As boundaries are crossed, blessing leads to blessing in mutually enriching ways. Exploring this dynamic opens up fresh possibilities for understanding how the love of God is tied inseparably to the love of neighbour. It also helps address the collaborative vision recently expressed by Muslim leaders in A Common Word, for the praxis of hospitality holds out the promise of cultivating interfaith vistas of justice, reconciliation, and peace.

Welcoming without Reserve?: A Case in Christian Hospitality

In an interconnected and diverse world, Christians are called to hospitality. Yet this is no easy matter, for welcoming the stranger requires becoming vulnerable. A particular case in Christian hospitality illustrates the point. Hosting a Jewish funeral, a church community elected to cover its sanctuarys cross. While such an action can be seen as scandalous, an act of bad faith, I argue instead that it embodies hospitality—scandalous, indeed, but in a positive sense. On several accounts, this instance of covering the cross opens up new ways of thinking about being Christian in a religiously diverse world.

Past and Present with Disability in the Christian Tradition

This article highlights how Disability in the Christian Tradition helps open important reconsiderations of traditions of theology in light of disability. It focuses on two themes. In the first instance, it explores the contours of the pasts relation with the present as it is expressed generally in the volume. In the second, the article interrogates theological anthropology in light of disability, questioning whether Christian theology attends adequately to disability by foregrounding human worth “outside” of disability and by treating it in isolation from its intersection with other features of embodied life, such as race, sexuality, gender, and class.