Plough Quarterly No. 30 - Made Perfect: Ability and Disability

Molly McCully Brown (Author) Victoria Reynolds Farmer (Author)

& 10 more

Description

Whose lives count as fully human? The answer matters for everyone, disabled or not.

The ancient Greek ideal linked physical wholeness to moral wholeness - the virtuous citizen was "beautiful and good." It's an ideal that has all too often turned deadly, casting those who do not measure up as less than human. In the pre-Christian era, infants with disabilities were left on the rocks; in modern times, they have been targeted by eugenics.

Much has changed, thanks to the tenacious advocacy of the disability rights movement. Yesteryear's hellish institutions have given way to customized educational programs and assisted living centers. Public spaces have been reconfigured to improve access. Therapies and medical technology have advanced rapidly in sophistication and effectiveness. Protections for people with disabilities have been enshrined in many countries' antidiscrimination laws.

But these victories, impressive as they are, mask other realities that collide awkwardly with society's avowals of equality. Why are parents choosing to abort a baby likely to have a disability? Why does Belgian law allow for euthanasia in cases of disability, even absent a terminal diagnosis or physical pain? Why, when ventilators were in short supply during the first Covid wave, did some states list disability as a reason to deny care?

On this theme:

- Heonju Lee tells how his son with Down syndrome saved another child's life.

- Molly McCully Brown and Victoria Reynolds Farmer recount their personal experiences with disability.

- Amy Julia Becker says meritocracies fail because they value the wrong things.

- Maureen Swinger asks six mothers around the world about raising a child with disabilities.

- Joe Keiderling documents the unfinished struggle for disability rights.

- Isaac T. Soon wonders if Saint Paul's "thorn in the flesh" was a disability.

- Leah Libresco Sargeant reviews What Can a Body Do? and Making Disability Modern.

- Sarah C. Williams says testing for fetal abnormalities is not a neutral practice.

Also in the issue:

- Ross Douthat is brought low by intractable Lyme disease.

- Edwidge Danticat flees an active shooter in a packed mall.

- Eugene Vodolazkin finds comic relief at funerals, including his own father's.

- Kelsey Osgood discovers that being an Orthodox Jew is strange, even in Brooklyn.

- Christian Wiman pens three new poems.

- Susannah Black profiles Flannery O'Conner.

- Our writers review Eyal Press's Dirty Work, Steve Coll's Directorate S, and Millennial Nuns by the Daughters of Saint Paul.

Plough Quarterly features stories, ideas, and culture for people eager to apply their faith to the challenges we face. Each issue includes in-depth articles, interviews, poetry, book reviews, and art.

Product Details

Price

$12.00 $11.16

Publisher

Plough Publishing House

Publish Date

November 30, 2021

Pages

112

Dimensions

7.32 X 10.16 X 0.39 inches | 0.55 pounds

Language

English

Type

Paperback

EAN/UPC

9781636080499

BISAC Categories:

People with Disabilities

Ethics & Moral Philosophy

People with Disabilities

Christian Living - Social Issues

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About the Author

Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah's Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; and the novel-in-stories, The Dew Breaker. She is the editor of The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Diaspora in the United States and The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Men and Women of All Colors and Cultures, Haiti Noir and Haiti Noir 2, and Best American Essays 2011. She has written several books for young adults and children--Anacaona, Behind the Mountains, Eight Days, The Last Mapou, Mama's Nightingale, and Untwine--as well as a travel narrative, After the Dance, A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel. Her memoir, Brother, I'm Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. She is a 2009 MacArthur Fellow.

Stephanie Saldana is a journalist and religion scholar from San Antonio, Texas, who has spent most of the last twenty years living in the Middle East. Saldana studied religion at Harvard Divinity School and is the author of A Country Between and The Bread of Angels, hailed by Geraldine Brooks as "a remarkable, wise, and lovely book." Her work has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, America Magazine, and Plough, and she has been featured on National Public Radio. Saldana and her family split their time between Bethlehem and France.

Kelsey Osgood is a Brooklyn-based writer. She has contributed to The New Yorker's Culture Desk blog, Salon, New York, and Gothamist, among others. She is a graduate of Columbia University and Goucher's College's MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. How to Disappear Completely is her first book.

Christian Wiman is the author, editor, or translator of more than a dozen books of poetry and prose, including two memoirs, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer and He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art; Every Riven Thing, winner of the Ambassador Book Award; Once in the West, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and Survival Is a Style--all published by FSG. He teaches religion and literature at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music and at Yale Divinity School.

Amy Julia Becker is the author of Penelope Ayers: A Memoir, which critic Andy Crouch included in his list of the best books of 2009. She graduated from Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary, and writes regularly for Motherlode, the parenting blog of The New York Times. Her essays have appeared in First Things, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Christian Century, ChristianityToday.com, Bloom, and other venues. Amy Julia lives in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, with her husband and three children.

Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times op-ed page. He is the author of To Change the Church, Bad Religion, and Privilege, and coauthor of Grand New Party. Before joining the New York Times, he was a senior editor for the Atlantic. He is the film critic for National Review, and he cohosts the New York Times's weekly op-ed podcast, The Argument. He lives in New Haven with his wife and four children.

Eugene Vodolazkin was born in Kiev in 1964. An expert in Old Russian literature, Vodolazkin has worked in the department of Old Russian Literature at Pushkin House since 1990. He has numerous academic books and articles to his name, and has been awarded research and lectureship fellowships in Germany from both the Toepfer and Alexander von Humboldt Foundations. Vodolazkin's debut novel, Solovyov and Larionov, was shortlisted for the Andrei Bely Prize and The Big Book Prize. Laurus is Vodolazkin's second novel. It won both of Russia's major literary awards, The Book Book Prize and the Yasnaya Polyana Award. Vodolazkin lives with his family in St Petersburg, Russia.

Sarah C. Williams trained as an historian at the University of Oxford, where she subsequently taught British and European political and cultural history. After seventeen years at Oxford, in 2005 she moved with her family to Vancouver, Canada, where she taught history at Regent College. Today Williams lives with her husband Paul in the Cotswolds, close to the city of Oxford, where she continues her research, writing, and teaching. The daughter of popular British author Jennifer Rees Larcombe, Williams is the author of Perfectly Human, a spiritual autobiography in which she reflects on contemporary debates surrounding identity and personhood.

Life Support: Healing Body, Mind & Spirit