As a Seed Is to the Plant

Ableism is when you try to heal me, and fix me and promise that I will walk, or see, or hear or that I will be everything I was really meant to be … one day in heaven Ableism is believing that heaven is an able-bodied place where broken bodies finally become ‘whole’ – Maria…
Why Heaven Is Not Just a Better Version of Vegas

How often do you wonder what your personality will be like when you no longer have to think about trying not to be grumpy when you are tired? Have you ever asked what your inner world might be like when you never have to try not to think uncharitable thoughts? Have you ever been tempted…
Sin, Resurrection, and Disability

For many of us who acquired our disabilities after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act and Nancy Eiesland’s seminal work, The Disabled God (1994), disability is not a source of shame but a source of pride. After I was first diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in graduate school, many of my initial encounters with…
Impairments in the Resurrection?

Yes, we will be fully healed of our bodily and mental disabilities in the resurrection. Actually, that is too easy an answer. Why? Because it is strictly speaking impossible to be ‘disabled’ in heaven. Because ‘disability’ has come to refer to a problem in social relationships, where we fail to care for one another as…
Shining through the Cracks

The question whether (all) disabilities will be (completely) healed in the resurrection resonates deeply with me on a personal level. I write as a man who was born with a physical disability, a neuromuscular disorder resulting from in-utero exposure to rubella, or German measles. The effects of this exposure were primarily mobility-related, though I do…
Disability and the Resurrection: An Introduction

Joni Eareckson Tada has lived for more than fifty years as a person with quadriplegia, the result of injuries sustained in a diving accident when she was a teenager. She uses a motorized wheelchair for mobility. When envisioning what it will be like to meet Jesus for the first time in eternity, she imagines herself…
The Recovery of Creatureliness

“All of this presupposes that we are creatures capable of observing, sustaining, and living suspended in the fragile beauty of the world around us, within us, and beyond us” (p. 358, emphasis added). With these words, Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn concludes her argument calling for a recovery of inwardness in response to a pervasive culture she terms…
The Art of Ars Vitae

I’ve always been amused by the fact that the nineteenth-century art movement Impressionism got its name from a satirical review of Claude Monet’s painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise). Louis Leroy created a fictional dialogue between observers of the painting, having one of them say that “a preliminary drawing for a wallpaper pattern is more…
Of Spiritual Journeys and Autobiographies

Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s Ars Vitae is just the kind of reasonable, non-polemical book that our society needs today. Equally adept at diagnosing the problem and offering cogent solutions, Lasch-Quinn balances well the theoretical and the practical, the external and the internal, the philosophical and the theological, the pagan and the Christian, the academic and the popular,…
The Art of Living

In Book Ten of his Confessions, Augustine makes the seemingly incontrovertible claim that everyone wishes to be happy. “We hear the word ‘happiness,’ and all of us admit that we strive for the thing itself” (10.29). There’s not a person in this world, Augustine says, who doesn’t have some intuitive sense of the meaning of…
Image and Transhumanism

The question before us is not: how does reflection on transhumanism inform our theological anthropology in general? Nor is it: what role does the interpretation of the imago Dei have in the construction of our theological anthropology in general? It is specifically about how reflection on transhumanism helps us refine our understanding of the image…
The Frailties of Embodied Existence

This is not just an academic question for me. As I am writing this essay, I am serving as the primary caregiver for my 88-year-old father who is suffering from multiple co-morbidities, including dementia. The frailties and limitations of our embodied condition are part of his (and, therefore, my) daily experience. Since I am a…