Disabled Church

F. Spurrier Rebecca

Description

How do communities consent to difference? How do they recognize and create the space and time necessary for the differences and disabilities of those who constitute them? Christian congregations often make assumptions about the shared abilities, practices, and experiences that are necessary for communal worship. The author of this provocative new book takes a hard look at these assumptions through a detailed ethnographic study of an unusual religious community where more than half the congregants live with diagnoses of mental illness, many coming to the church from personal care homes or independent living facilities. Here, people's participation in worship disrupts and extends the formal orders of worship. Whenever one worships God at Sacred Family Church, there is someone who is doing it differently.Here, the author argues, the central elements and the participation in the symbols of Christian worship raise questions rather than supply clear markers of unity, prompting the question, What do you need in order to have a church that assumes difference at its heart?Based on three years of ethnographic research, The Disabled Church describes how the Sacred Family community, comprising people with very different mental abilities, backgrounds, and resources, sustains and embodies a common religious identity. It explores how an ethic of difference is both helped and hindered by a church's embodied theology. Paying careful attention to how these congregants improvise forms of access to a common liturgy, this book offers a groundbreaking theology of worship that engages both the fragility and beauty revealed by difference within the church. As liturgy requires consent to difference rather than coercion, an aesthetic approach to differences within Christian liturgy provides a frame for congregations and Christian liturgists to pay attention to the differences and disabilities of worshippers. This book creates a distinctive conversation between critical disability studies, liturgical aesthetics, and ethnographic theology, offering an original perspective on the relationship between beauty and disability within Christian communities. Here is a transformational theological aesthetics of Christian liturgy that prioritizes human difference and argues for the importance of the Disabled Church.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian theology
• Theology
• Christianity

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 01 octobre 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823285556
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 17 Mo

Extrait

T h e D i s a b l e d C h u r c h

The Disabled Church Human Difference and the Art of Communal Worship

Rebecca F. Spurrier

f o r d h a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s New York 2019

Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Spurrier, Rebecca F., author. Title: The disabled church : human difference and the art of communal  worship / Rebecca F. Spurrier. Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2020. |  Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019028504 | ISBN 9780823285532 (hardback) | ISBN  9780823285525 (paperback) | ISBN 9780823285549 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Public worship. | People with disabilities—Religious  aspects—Christianity. | People with disabilities—Religious life. Classification: LCC BV15 .S68 2020 | DDC 264.0087—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019028504

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1

First edition

for Sacred Family Church

and for Silas

t e x t u a l d e s c r i p t i o n o f t h e c o v e r a r t a n d t i t l e

The image on the front cover is a photograph by Cindy M. Brown of a room where Sacred Family artists weave together during weekly day pro- grams. In the center of the photograph is a painting of a loom by a Sacred Family Artist (used here with permission). The loom is rendered in dark green on a bright red background and sits on a black floor. Next to the loom is a small brown table on which are piled cones of thread and a smaller table loom. The painting hangs on a cream-colored brick wall that sits over an actual table on which are piled cones of thread of various sizes and col- ors — red, gold, green, purple, aqua, white, multicolored. A manual bobbin winder is in the center of the table with scissors beside it. The dominant colors of red and green in the cover and title are reminis- cent of the bright reds and greens of the cover of Nancy L. Eiesland’s book The Disabled God, which is referenced by this book’s title,The Disabled Church. The title is not a description of Sacred Family Church but rather an argument for the transformation of the Christian church.

v

i

Preface

c o n t e n t s

 Introduction. Disabling Liturgy, Desiring Human Difference

 1.

Gathering: Unfolding a Liturgy of Difference

 2. Weaving: Aesthetics of Interdependence

 3. Disrupting: Aesthetics of Time and Work

 4.

Naming: Aesthetics of Healing and Claiming

 5. Sending: Aesthetics of Belonging

 Conclusion. The Disabled Church: Beauty and the Creation of a Community of Difference

Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

vii

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65

99

131

167

195

215 217 235 241

p r e f a c e

For three years I am known as the person who wanders around Sacred Family Church with a notebook and a voice recorder. One spring morning a congregant calls me to her and asks me to record her skills in my research notebook. Before I begin, Lillian makes sure that I write down the date: “March 11, 2014.” She then asks me to record this list:

I can do hair. I write poems. I can sing. I can fight. I can sew. I can paint. I can dream dreams. I have visions. I can see things that aren’t there. I see invisible people. I can do makeup and nails. I can have good sex. I’m a librarian. I can dress—fashion dress—model gowns. I’m a good lover. I can tell fortunes.

Lillian’s description of herself and the playfulness of the moment lead her to use her fortune-telling skills to tell me about myself. I like talking to Lillian. I am fond of her witty company. She has shared some heartbreak- ing stories from her life with me, but she also makes me laugh, and I share with her stories about my life. I offer her my hand. She takes it and care- fully runs her finger along the lines in my palm, talking to me while she does: “You’ll have a long life. You’ll have two children: a girl and another baby.” And then as she runs her fi ngers along my fingers: “You are

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