Let me start with saying that I am immensely grateful to the contributors to this Book Symposium for the time they have devoted to reading my book Disability, Providence, and Ethics: Bridging Gaps, Transforming Lives and for the comments they made. My own inclination of how to respond brought back a remark I once heard…

I have profited greatly from Hans Reinders’s previous works on disability, in particular his The Future of the Disabled in Liberal Society and Receiving the Gift of Friendship, both of which I have reviewed elsewhere. In the former, Reinders suggests that the key to securing the future of persons with (mental) disabilities in “liberal” society…

I was reading Dr. Reinders’s book this past September while Hurricane Dorian was wreaking havoc on the nearby islands of Abaco and Grand Bahama so close to the Florida coast. In his chapter on “Cosmic Fairness,” I was struck by the idea that the “Why?” question “gets smothered in silence” (p. 50), though sometimes it…

We briefly considered hitting ‘pause’ on our preaching series in Romans this past summer. We were approaching chapters 9–11, where Paul explores some of the most difficult questions in the Bible, including providence. In the end, we pressed on—and we were glad we did. Read in the flow of the letter, Romans 9–11 doesn’t preach…

The problem of evil and the mystery of divine providence are deep existential issues. Even among those who do not believe in God, the tendency of the human spirit is to look for reasons for “why bad things happen to good people,” to quote the title of a best-seller on the subject. In most people’s…

Providence can be difficult to understand in the context of disability; and understanding the contours of this issue and the “conception of the universe, a particular way of looking at the world and our temporal existence in it” (p. 3) that lies behind all answers, is what Hans Reinders’s book Disability, Providence and Ethics: Bridging…