This thought-provoking book details the history of Catholic ministry to the Deaf community in South Africa over 120 years. This history provides a backdrop to Deaf people’s emerging understanding of themselves as a people imbued with dignity and having their own language and culture. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ understanding of saintliness, which is the ethical pursuit of prioritising a suffering neighbour’s needs above those of one’s own, provides a lens through which to, both sympathetically and critically, read this history.

This thought-provoking book details the history of Catholic ministry to the Deaf community in South Africa over 120 years. This history provides a backdrop to Deaf people’s emerging understanding of themselves as a people imbued with dignity and having their own language and culture. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ understanding of saintliness, which is the ethical pursuit of prioritising a suffering neighbour’s needs above those of one’s own, provides a lens through which to, both sympathetically and critically, read this history.

This thought-provoking book details the history of Catholic ministry to the Deaf community in South Africa over 120 years. This history provides a backdrop to Deaf people’s emerging understanding of themselves as a people imbued with dignity and having their own language and culture. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ understanding of saintliness, which is the ethical pursuit of prioritising a suffering neighbour’s needs above those of one’s own, provides a lens through which to, both sympathetically and critically, read this history.