The presentations in this session use the insights of disability studies to reexamine historical perspectives, question common perceptions of mental illness and intellectual ability, and highlight overlooked dimensions of human freedom and flourishing. Each in its own way names how ableism and collaborating oppressive forces limit the capacity for agency, knowledge, or spiritual engagement of the disabled. Each presentation envisions a liberating alternative for how disabled lives ought to be represented, regarded, and embraced.
Papers
This paper explores the entanglement of disability and faith in Frederick Douglass's writings. In contrast to other nineteenth-century deployments of broken bones, burns, and limps, Douglass refuses to attach innocence and passive receptivity to the disabled body. Instead, Douglass imbued disabled bodies with activity and resourcefulness. His narratives use disability to condemn slavery, as in the figures of Doctor Copper and Henny Bailey, as well as point to the possibility of slavery’s undoing. I’ll argue that, for Douglass, disability was more than a metaphor or revelation of false piety. Disability was lived materiality produced by a “diseased [white, Christian] imagination” that, when re-membered through its agential capacity, held promises of kinship and freedom.
This paper traces how Christian representations of madness and moral choice impacted Anglo-American healthcare in the 19th and early 20th century. Theological associations between autonomy and self-management framed modern psychology as a moral endeavor and the management of psychiatric conditions as control of the will. Normalcy, sanity, and health function not only as absence of psychosis, but also as lack of dependency. Using ethnographies of group therapy, I examine how self-management models for mood disorders require individual and self-reflective capacities which are outside the grasp of a person with a mood disorder. Rather than reflecting lived experiences of people with psychosocial disabilities, many self-management strategies assume a self-governing and independent moral agent. I argue that distributed agency and participatory decision-making better describe how people with psychosocial disabilities display agency, structuring moral choice as a collaborative event rather than an individual capacity.
Cook (2019), a psychiatrist and theologian, observes that religious experiences during mania and psychosis are often framed within a binary perception — that “either someone is psychotic, or they are having a genuine spiritual experience, but not both.” This framework dismisses and silences those who report profound religious experiences during mania or psychosis, reducing their accounts to purely illness narratives. Individuals experience epistemic injustice as diagnosis and psychiatry are prioritised over an individual’s interpretation of their experience as meaningful and spiritual. These experiences are consistently pathologized through the lens of mental illness, psychiatry, and medicine. Drawing on phenomenology of illness and epistemic injustice literature, this paper utilises first-person accounts of Christians who have reported religious experiences during mania and psychosis. The research highlights the significance of first-person narratives, amplifying an often-overlooked community, and advocating for freedom to interpret their experiences as both illness and meaningful religious encounters.
Individuals with intellectual disabilities experience disproportionately high rates of depression and anxiety (Mrayyan et al. 2019, 1), yet communication deficits often render these conditions undiagnosed and untreated. Conventional mental healthcare, which prioritizes medication and controlled environments, fails to address their holistic well-being. While recent literature explores spiritual care as a tool for alleviating mental distress, individuals with intellectual disabilities are often excluded due to assumptions that cognitive impairments preclude meaningful spiritual engagement (Bertelli et al. 2020). This paper challenges such assumptions by employing a disability-enabling hermeneutic (Swinton, 2011) and a somatic reading of biblical narratives, alongside the author’s autoethnographic experience as a primary caregiver for a son with Down Syndrome. God, as revealed in Scripture, meets individuals within their unique capacities. These findings advocate for spirituality as a viable resource for individuals with intellectual disabilities while challenging exclusionary attitudes in church communities and the privileging of hyper-cognitive spiritual practices.
This paper brings the study of intellectual disability into dialogue with contemplative theology, using resources from both these disciplines to challenge a narrow epistemology that sees intelligence only in terms of conceptual reasoning. Such a view of intelligence ignores scientific evidence that affect, embodiment, and reason are linked in cognition. It also ignores evidence that intelligence has been defined differently throughout history. Non-discursive forms of intelligence have been highly valued in the tradition of affective spirituality in medieval contemplative thought. Nevertheless, people with intellectual disabilities are often excluded from sacraments. In this paper I give evidence that contemplative writers valued forms of intelligence other than conceptual thought. I offer an alternative way of knowing described by the author of The Cloud of Unknowing. This paper claims that a reading of The Cloud in relation to intellectual disability will discover a way of knowing that is accessible to all.