Erin Raffety - Böcker

This book demonstrates the constructive insights the neurodiversity paradigm presents for a more thorough understanding of creation, human flourishing, Christian virtues, ecclesiology, belonging, youth ministry, prayer, worship, and justice.The neurodiversity movement is a social justice movement that celebrates the unique insights and strengths of Autistic people, people with ADHD, learning differences, and other experiences like Tourette’s and tics. Rather than viewing such experiences as deficits, the movement emphasizes the natural variation in the ways people think, learn, and live in the world. Yet, people with these diagnoses, who often identify as neurodivergent, have experienced prejudice and stigma in educational and church spaces due to their neurological or behavioral differences. Participation in church and learning environments is often a burden for neurodivergent people. What can theological educators and ministry leaders learn from the neurodiversity paradigm and movement? How might places of learning and worship be transformed by listening to the voices of neurodivergent people?Drawing on empirical research and lived experience, the contributions to this book pursue answers to these questions and present a vision of faith formation and theological education that centers the voices of neurodivergent people and cultivates environments where people of all neurotypes can flourish. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Disability & Religion.

American Christianity tends to view disabled persons as problems to be solved rather than people with experiences and gifts that enrich the church. Churches have generated policies, programs, and curricula geared toward "including" disabled people while still maintaining "able-bodied" theologies, ministries, care, and leadership. Ableism—not lack of ramps, of finances, or of accessible worship—is the biggest obstacle for disabled ministry in America. In From Inclusion to Justice, Erin Raffety argues that what our churches need is not more programs for disabled people but rather the pastoral tools to repent of able-bodied theologies and practices, listen to people with disabilities, lament ableism and injustice, and be transformed by God's ministry through disabled leadership. Without a paradigm shift from ministries of inclusion to ministries of justice, our practical theology falls short.Drawing on ethnographic research with congregations and families, pastoral experience with disabled people, teaching in theological education, and parenting a disabled child, Raffety, an able-bodied Christian writing to able-bodied churches, confesses her struggle to repent from ableism in hopes of convincing others to do the same. At the same time, Raffety draws on her interactions with disabled Christian leaders to testify to what God is still doing in the pews and the pulpit, uplifting and amplifying the ministry and leadership of people with disabilities as a vision toward justice in the kingdom of God.

Set in the remote, mountainous Guangxi Autonomous Region and based on ethnographic fieldwork, Families We Need traces the movement of three Chinese foster children, Dengrong, Pei Pei, and Meili, from the state orphanage into the humble, foster homes of Auntie Li, Auntie Ma, and Auntie Huang. Traversing the geography of Guangxi, from the modern capital Nanning where Pei Pei and Meili reside, to the small farming village several hours away where Dengrong is placed, this ethnography details the hardships of social abandonment for disabled children and disenfranchised, older women in China, while also analyzing the state's efforts to cope with such marginal populations and incorporate them into China's modern future. The book argues that Chinese foster families perform necessary, invisible service to the Chinese state and intercountry adoption, yet the bonds they form also resist such forces, exposing the inequalities, privilege, and ableism at the heart of global family making.