Forum on Julia Watts Belser’s Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: This forum brings together a diverse group of scholars to respond to Julia Watts Belser's 2023 book Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole.The group initially convened for a hybrid roundtable session organized by Andrew Walker-Cornetta at the American Academy of Religion's Annual Meeting in November 2023.As a scholar of rabbinic literature, Belser has long drawn readers' attention to the ways gender, religion, and disability have shaped how the body was imagined in antiquity (See for instance, Belser 2018).In Loving Our Own Bones, Belser offers another powerful rumination on embodiment, but this time pairs interpretations of biblical narrative with ideas from contemporary disability activists and thinkers, herself included.In joining these discourses, Belser crafts for readers what she calls disability wisdom: a mode of engagement that refuses the fantasy of an unrelated, autonomous body in favor of a more interdependent, unapologetic model of what it means to be human-together.Roundtable participants responded to Belser's account of disability wisdom from a wide range of disciplines, including modern Jewish thought, womanist ethics, history, and biblical studies.Their remarks were similarly capacious, combining praise, challenge, and invitation in equal measure.Each panelist's response is published here in essay format, followed by a reply from Belser.Fannie Bialek considers the role of temporality in Loving Our Own Bones, homing in on Belser's critique of futurity.For Bialek, Belser's aversion to future-oriented thinking is well founded, given futurity's tendency to reduce vulnerability (in general) and disability (in particular) into perennial obstacles to overcome.Yet Bialek hesitates to abandon the concept entirely, arguing for a revised understanding of futurity which "looks to the future as part of loving and knowing oneself now, instead of using the future to reject one's present conditions."Andrew Walker-Cornetta puts Belser's work in conversation with his own research on mid-twentieth century U.S. Catholics, many of whom occupied subject positions that were proximate yet ultimately 'outside' of disability.For these Catholics, to practice disability theology was to find divinity in relation to disability rather than from disability itself.What, asks Walker-Cornetta, are we to make of this endeavor?What potential might there be in articulating disability wisdom 'from the outside'?Heike Peckruhn approaches Belser's work from the vantage of body theology and pedagogy, narrating her experience teaching Loving Our Own Bones over several iterations.At first, Peckruhn taught the book from a "walled-off, distanced intellectual space, " but finding this method lacking, began focusing on the affective dimensions of Loving Our Own Bones.In taking this new approach, Peckruhn finds a mode of teaching that feels right-not only in its resonance with students, but also its
Source: Journal of Disability & Religion
Author: Angela Xia
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4403254153