I’m teaching a course on theology and disability this semester at Calvin Theological Seminary. We’ve been exploring a wide range of issues during the first part of the course: some general issues in disability studies, how some influential theologians have thought about disability, disability and scripture, different views about how disabilities relate to eschatology. For the next four weeks of the course, we’ll be reading all of Shane Clifton’s Crippled Grace: Disability, Virtue Ethics, and the Good Life.
I first met Shane at the Summer Institute on Theology and Disability last summer, where he was one of the keynote speakers. (You can view or listen to that talk here.)
Having an interest in virtue ethics and doing some current writing on how disabilities relate to well-being, I was really interested to get his book. I’ve greatly enjoyed reading it. I think it’ll be a lot of fun to walk through with my students over the next few weeks.
Though I won’t cover things to the same degree of detail that I will in the course, I thought it might be also be good to summarize some of the main issues the book deals with here, as well as raise some questions and points of disagreement (as an academic, there are always points of disagreement).
So if you’d be interested in following along, consider this an official invitation. And if you go to my homepage, you can enter your email address to be automatically notified of new updates here on my blog–including this new series.
