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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…