Negotiating the Disabled Body – Review
I have been researching how biblical texts portray disabilities and this has brought me to Negotiating the Disabled Body by Anna Rebecca Solevåg.
While much of the book deals with texts from the New Testament, it does touch on other early Christian texts such as the Acts of Peter.
Both ourselves and the original authors bring preconceptions about what it means to be a person with disabilities. The author challenges us to rethink those ideas and to see the stories with new interpretive lenses.
She succeeds at this. For example, I will never read the story of the four men lowering the paralytic through the roof the same way again. I never realized what I had been reading into that story or the other interpretations possible from the text.
She also compares how the LGBTQ community uses “queer” with how the disability community uses “crip” and uses that to reinterpret some passages.
I definitely recommend this book for anyone interested in how the New Testament (and other Christian texts) portray disabilities.
