Each of the presentations in this session explores how careful attention to specific resources yields vital insights regarding the intersection of religious thought and representations of disability. The first presentation privileges disabled women's embodied experience in an effort to make disability theology more inclusive and liberative. The second pairs a phenomenology of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder with the ancient monastic practice of dispassion to highlight possibilities for psychical freedom and healing. The third interrogates early Brahmanical and Buddhist portrayals of religious dwarf figures as the basis for an exploration of ideal embodiment and disability from South Asian perspectives.
Disability theology has long addressed the theological and social implications of disability, yet disabled perspectives often remain secondary to nondisabled analyses. This paper reclaims the disabled body as a privileged site of divine revelation, drawing from M. Shawn Copeland’s liberative framework in Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being. Copeland argues that bodies provoke theology, contesting its hypotheses and resisting its margins. Expanding this methodology, I center the disabled woman’s experience as a locus theologicus, revealing how the disabled body unsettles ableist theological constructs and redefines spirituality through survival, resistance, and flourishing. This paper ultimately argues that disability theology must center disabled voices, not merely for inclusion but for liberation—freedom from societal and theological frameworks that diminish disabled personhood. By foregrounding embodied disabled experience, this work deepens theological anthropology, challenges systemic ableism, and affirms disability as a revelatory source of divine presence.
Speaking from my own experience with OCD, I will describe in this paper the phenomenon of the obsessive intrusive thought as the OCD sufferer experiences it. I will also propose a recovery of the ancient monastic practice of “dispassion” as a manner of responding to intrusive thoughts without obsession, that is, as a way of relating to the thoughts less neurotically and with greater psychical freedom. It is precisely this relationship between thoughts and passions that Rowan Williams so helpfully describes in various places in his body of writings, influenced as he is by the ancient Christian monastic tradition. I will turn, therefore, to Williams and to one of his beloved ancient monks, Maximus the Confessor, to try to untangle the complex relationship between thoughts and passions which is operative within OCD and to present dispassion as a form of psycho-spiritual healing for the OCD sufferer.
This paper will examine the abundant depictions of dwarf figures, or little persons, from early Brahmanical and Buddhist traditions to argue that the predominance of these depictions may imply that dwarfism was treated as distinct from other physical disorders. To this end, it will use textual and visual sources from c. 1st-5th centuries CE spanning across the northern half of the Indian subcontinent. While texts like the Sanskrit Manusmṛti and the Pali Vinaya include dwarfism as one of the ‘non-ideal’ or ‘disabling’ conditions, visual depictions of religious dwarf figures often portray them as other ‘ideal’ figures – a contradiction that can be found in both textual and visual portrayals. These portrayals highlight two related narratives. Firstly, even though dwarf bodies are considered ‘disordered,’ whether they are ‘disabled’ depends on their socio-religious context. Secondly, the abundance of both ideal and non-ideal dwarf depictions indicates their ‘special’ position among other physically disordered bodies.