Jean Vanier

Throughout its history, the church has done a poor job including persons with disability. This has often been the result of implicit understandings of rationalism or ableism within modern western society. Additionally, within the Christian tradition, there has been a trend to assume a link between disability and sin. In an attempt to reconcile the problem of inclusion and disability, many theologians have recently begun crafting theologies of liberation, access, and inclusion. However, many of these theologies of disability have not been inclusive of persons with profound intellectual disability, as many theologies of liberation and access assume a particular amount of purposive self agency, or the ability of a person to speak and act for themselves. Thus, even within these theologies of disability that attempt to provide a rationale for the inclusion of persons with disability, persons with profound intellectual disability remain actively barred from inclusion and participation. In this thesis, I combat the exclusion of persons with disability, as well as the implicit assumptions of rationalism, ableism, and the perceived link between sin and disability, by attempting to understand persons with disability first through the lens of theological anthropology. I examine the relational theological anthropology of Karl Barth, which understands humanity not through any innate capacities or abilities, but through the person of Jesus Christ, as a way of crafting a framework for disability theology. Additionally, Barth's anthropology is grounded in his doctrine of election, which I also examine. However, in Barth's corpus, he does not explicitly examine some of the questions surrounding persons with disability. Thus, to bridge the gap between disability and Barth's theological anthropology and doctrine of election, I place Barth in conversation with Jean Vanier, identifying similarities between Barth and Vanier that will help us to come to a more holistic understanding of inclusion and disability.

The medical model of disability, though beneficial for the medical professional, is often exclusionary, restrictive and dehumanizing when applied to the lived experience of disability. As a result, a critique of this model was constructed called the social model of disability. Much of the language used to articulate the purpose behind the social model of disability can be summed up within the word inclusion. However, this essay asserts that inclusiveness is an incomplete aspiration. The social model, as it currently stands, does not aid in creating a society where those with impairments actually belong. Rather, the social model aids in lessening the visibility, or negative consequence of, difference. Therefore, the social model does not invite society to welcome those with physical and intellectual impairments. It simply aids society in ignoring the existence of impairment by removing explicit forms of exclusion. Rather than simple inclusion, then, this essay uses John Swinton’s concept of friendship and Jean Vanier’s understanding of belonging to better articulate the intended outcome of the social model—a society where everyone can belong.

How valuable can people with mental disabilities be to others? In this article I present ethnographic material on L'Arche, a Christian charity that provides care. I describe how carers there are trained to see cognitive disability as producing not simply an absence of rational agency, but also the presence of a quite different way of actively inhabiting the world. I argue that, by learning to recognize and value this unusual kind of agency, carers in L'Arche subvert the terms of a recent philosophical debate about the worth of people with cognitive disabilities. They demonstrate that people can value others not just as rational moral subjects, or simply as passive objects of care, but also as charismatic and intuitive agents who actively depart from standard norms of personhood.

The liberating work of God calls the oppressed out of oppression and the oppressor out of oppressing. The challenge in seeking a thorough liberation of oppressors is to help them understand their need for freedom and how to seek this freedom in their own contexts. Patrick Oden provides a holistic biblical, historical, and theological analysis that diagnoses the underlying motivations and inclinations that lead to oppression. Part one addresses the context of oppression, in which most participants in oppression do not actively seek to harm others but are caught up in systems that tend toward the diminishment of others. Part two examines the biblical and early Christian response to oppression, discovering a thread that avoids condemning participation in society generally while also cautioning the people of God about being co-opted by society. Part three discusses how oppressors can withdraw from oppression, through a constructive analysis of four contemporary theologians—Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jürgen Moltmann, Sarah Coakley, and Jean Vanier—each of whom contributes to a widening vision of liberated and liberating life in which the once-oppressed and former oppressor can find peace together in community.

Foreword written by Jürgen Moltmann

One of the most powerful claims of disability theology is that the rejection of persons with disabilities somehow correlates with a rejection of God. This ‘correlative rejection’ is, however, frequently just stated rather than explored in detail, something this article therefore seeks to remedy by examining one example of the correlative rejection that draws together the ethical concerns of theologians writing on intellectual disability with Meister Eckhart’s teaching on the human relationship with God. Here, the correlative rejection is exposed as an inevitable result of the narrow emphasis on autonomy and rationality in human self-perception which shape the habituated, even ritualised ways that we try to know persons with intellectual disabilities and God. By contrast, truly knowing and relating to persons with intellectual disabilities, God, and finally also ourselves, relies on a reconciliation with the dependence, vulnerability, and non-rational forms of exchange that a narrow attachment to autonomy and rationality seems directly to occlude. The correlative rejection thus signals both a practical and epistemological problem which results from how we view ourselves and how we subsequently relate to and try to know others, the harmful effects of which are both ethical and spiritual.

This paper compares two ways of providing care for adults with learning disabilities in a British city. It explores how different ways of supporting those who are particularly dependent affect the kind of political belonging these individuals can achieve. Most care providers in Endsleigh see caring relationships as merely instrumental to enabling people with learning disabilities to be independent in their local 'community'. In this respect, they see the relationship between bodily needs and political belonging similarly to Hannah Arendt, who argues that citizenship is achieved by mastering dependence. As a counterpoint to this mode of care, I delineate ethnographically a contrasting form of urban citizenship enabled by a Christian care provider called L'Arche. L'Arche builds a religious sociality around and in the care home. In doing so, it creates an urban community in which dependence on others is not an obstacle to, but a vehicle of political recognition. I argue that this alternative form of care challenges us to reconsider the relation between domestic dependence and public political belonging, and to investigate the diverse forms of urban citizenship that disability, dependence, and cognitive conditions require and enable. [care, dependence, learning disability, urban citizenship, Hannah Arendt, L'Arche]

What role does judgment play in certain kinds of critical anthropology and theology, and in attempts to bring the two disciplines together? I turn to L’Arche, a network of Christian communities in which people with ‘intellectual disabilities’ share life with the cognitively able that scholars commend as a critical alternative to our obsession with judging ability as the marker of moral worth. I describe how this evaluative stance on L’Arche failed me in trying to make sense of my own fieldwork on a L’Arche community where care-givers emphasised the abilities of those they supported all the time. By relating the surprising role that a work of theology played in helping me understand the relationship between agency and judgment in this context, I argue that critique offers an unhelpful point of intersection between anthropology and theology. I propose, instead, that we explore the role of surprise in analysis and dialogue.

This chapter takes an anthropological approach to relationships in a community project for people with intellectual disabilities to explore the role of friendship in their lives more generally in the UK.

From the blurb of the book: "One of the great prophetic figures of our time was Jean Vanier, founder of the L'Arche communities, where those with and without disabilities share life together. This book tells the story of a new, practical development, inspired by Vanier, and taking further both his thought and the practice of L'Arche. Lyn's House is a small Christian house of hospitality and friendship in Cambridge, set in an open community of volunteers and supporters. Its story told here contains moving accounts of its origins and development, and of the friendships it enables. The contributors, all members of the wider Lyn's House community, also reflect on its meaning, and explore the implications for both church and society of this creative response to Vanier's call. Not only does the book convey the spirit of Lyn's House and its transformative effects on those who participate in it, it also offers inspiration and a practical guide to any who wish to begin something similar."

https://www.jkp.com/uk/a-kind-of-upside-downness.html

Na mocy chrztu świetnego każdy człowiek jest powołany do świętości. Realizuje się ono przede wszystkim w rozwoju duchowym człowieka. Ze względu na powszechność tego dążenia i powołania włączone są w nie także osoby z niepełnosprawnością intelektualną. Jedną z propozycji dróg duchowego rozwoju tych ludzi jest istniejący na całym świecie ruch Wiara i Światło. Poprzez wspólnoty zrzeszające osoby z niepełnosprawnością ich rodziny i przyjaciół powstaje możliwość, aby realizowało się to wezwanie chrześcijańskiego życia. Cenną wskazówka w rozumieniu świętości jest najnowsza adhortacja papieża Franciszka o powszechnym powołaniu do świętości Gaudete et exultate.

This paper engages both the work of Karl Barth and Jean Vanier to show how, read together, they provide an account of why persons with disabilities must be included within the life of the church. Barth and Vanier provide a rationale that insists that persons with disabilities must not be excluded and that in radically including persons with disabilities in our communities, we embark on a journey towards greater human flourishing, both for persons with impairments and those without. Daniel Rempel is a PhD student at the University of Aberdeen. Prior to that, Daniel worked as a disability support worker for just over four years, first at a day program for adults with disabilities, and more recently in a home with three gentlemen with intellectual and physical disabilities. Daniel_Rempel@

Międzynarodowa Wspólnota Wiara i Światło istnieje oficjalnie od 1971 roku, a do Polski dotarła w roku 1977. Jednak jej historia zaczęła się dużo wcześniej od wydarzeń związanych z cierpieniem francuskiej rodziny Proffit, której uniemożliwiono udział w zbiorowej pielgrzymce do Lourdes, ze względu na niepełnosprawność ich dzieci. Dzięki zaangażowaniu założyciela Arki Jeana Vaniera i Marie – Helene Mathieu w 1971 roku zorganizowano pierwszą pielgrzymkę, w której uczestniczyły osoby z niepełnosprawnością intelektualną, ich rodzice i przyjaciele. To wydarzenie, w którym wzięło udział kilkanaście tysięcy ludzi z różnych krajów stało się punktem zapalnym dla powstania Ruchu Wiara i Światło skupiających osoby z niepełnosprawnością intelektualną, ich bliskich i przyjaciół zorganizowanych w małych grupach rozsianych po całym świecie. W to wielkie działo wpisuje się Polska, w której pierwsze Wspólnoty postały w latach 70 – tych XX wieku, a dziś skupiają tysiące ludzi w ponad dziewięćdziesięciu wspólnotach.