Customer Reviews

Spirit and the Politics of Disablement

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A stunning breath of fresh air for Christians, the world and especially those who find themselves "other bodied," including poets, mystics and holy fools! The Rev. Dr. Betcher, speaking from a pastor's heart, but with a scholars bite, has managed to gnaw open the spine (as in Frieda Kahlo's cover art) and reveal the deep wounds of our society which still staggers under the flawed, arrogant notion of perfection being goal and disability somehow being other and surely invisible. If you're ready to join wisdon's song for our time, this is a must read.

This is a brilliant book! It offers deep, critical insights into our commonly accepted ideas about human bodies and their effects on all of us. The book's constructive work on the Spirit and Hope are also unique and enticing. Worth reading more than once.

I read this book for a graduate-level theology of the body class. As a person with a disability this book is loaded with good ideas. However, it gets muddled down by over-citation. The introduction alone had over 100 citations. Each citation is relevant, but I would have liked to hear more of Betcher's voice than direct quotes from a plethora of scholars. This book reads like a dissertation run amok. However, if one can weed through all the referential material and academic lingo, it offers a useful analytic for examining disability and religion.

This is not a book for the average reader. You need an extensive vocabulary in both theology and philosophy to read this book. The sentence structure frequently requires the ability to diagram complex sentences to enable you to begin to unwind complex sentence structure to make sense of what you are reading. After dipping into various parts of the book I decided that the content was just not worth the struggle.