"For example, Baylor University Press in 2007 published the theologian Amos Yong's book, "Theology and Down Syndrome : Reimagining Disability in Late Modernity". It is an important work that takes both the culture and the Church to task for having a too-limited view--one might say, "handicapped" --view of people with intellectual disabilities."
"Underpinning Yong's work is the fact that he grew up a child of Assembly of God pastors and has a younger brother with Down syndrome. In his earlier books,Yong made a case for a "pneumatological imagination" enlightened by the Holy Spirit. Here, he suggests that such an imagination is needed to help Christians think more deeply" (and, may I add, fairly) "about people with disabilities and their role in creation and in the Church."
"He argues that Christian perspectives on disability have colluded with modern medicine -- perhaps unintentionally -- to produce a "medicalized" view of disabilities, both physical and intellectual. If he is right, it is this medicalized view that is driving the nine-out-of-ten statistics concerning the number of Down syndrome pregnancies that are aborted. It is interesting here to note that in 1998 study of Finnish doctors' opinions of Down Syndrome screening revealed that 15 to 21% of doctors thought the current prenatal screening in general is partly based eugenic thinking."
"It is this idea of speaking to the culture that there is a parallel with art, literature, music. George Steiner's thoughtful book, " Real Presences", suggests that responding to a meaningful form in a text, an artwork, or a piece of music is essentially a metaphysical and theological act. In the same way, to receive and respond to a person, any person, including one with an intellectual disability, is to respond to a living text whose Author is God."
"Steiner says concerning the arts: 'What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition, and where its absence is no longer a felt, indeed, overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable.' ":
"The magazine New Scientist touched on the topic of human worth when it devoted a large section in its July 26, 2008 issue of the topic of reason. The bioethicist Tom Shakespeare suggested that a focus on rationality doesn't get at the complexity of how we live our lives, since our brains feel as well as think -- with vast repercussions for issues such as disability. If people are valued only for their output or performance, then disabled and older people could be viewed as too costly to keep alive -- it simply might not be "rational" to keep them around."
"Or as Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, put it in the same issue of the magazine:
'Absolute convictions about human worth... are not simply generated by instrumental reason. They have more in common with the pre-modern "rationality" of recognizing oneself and one's fellow humans as standing together in a common relation with a certain kind of "order," the way things "just are, " in the universe.'
"..... and by reasoning through what Paul said about male and female, slave and free, Scythian and Jew and Greek.... it should then be a little easier to decide what is habitable earth."
Once again quoting from , "A Habitable World" by Lance Nixon in Jan/Feb 2010 "Touchstone" magazine, with thanks.
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I an reminded of an article that Father Neuhaus wrote for First Things called "Born Toward Dying". It is the best thing I have ever read on the subject of man's eventual death. Here is the first paragraph and I you want to read the whole article you can find it here..... http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/02/born-toward-dying-8
ReplyDeleteWe are born to die. Not that death is the purpose of our being born, but we are born toward death, and in each of our lives the work of dying is already underway. The work of dying well is, in largest part, the work of living well. Most of us are at ease in discussing what makes for a good life, but we typically become tongue-tied and nervous when the discussion turns to a good death. As children of a culture radically, even religiously, devoted to youth and health, many find it incomprehensible, indeed offensive, that the word "good" should in any way be associated with death. Death, it is thought, is an unmitigated evil, the very antithesis of all that is good.