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This essay is inspired by a moment at the conclusion of Julia Watts Belser's Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole (2023). It takes Belser's stated desire to "know the sacred through a thousand disabled languages" as an invitation to think about the risks and rewards of imagining the divine in and through others' differences. It places Belser's insights in conversation with the author's own research into mid-twentieth century Catholic engagements with cognitive impairment in the United States, what the essay calls "disability theology before disability theology," and uses that conversation to return to what have been some enduring impasses in disability studies.
Andrew Walker-Cornetta (Sat,) studied this question.