My last post, you may have discerned, was really a combo of a post responding to Helen’s piece with an abortion post I was already planning to write. As a result, the disability part of it kind of got short shrift. But I’ve been thinking about it further and wanted to add a few more thoughts specifically related to disability.

One, I’ve been out and about many times with my brother-in-law, who’s in a wheelchair due to an injury, and I thoroughly approve of ramps, curb breaks, lifts, etc. To my mind, they never represented an illusion of independence so much as simple infrastructure. I’m not up on the details of the ADA, but I don’t have a conceptual problem with the government getting involved in their building either. By building the highways and such for cars the government helped create a society where even basic socializing requires a greater level of mobility than ever before, so it seems a bit churlish to say that it’s special treatment to help the disabled get around on wheels, when everybody else gets around on wheels so much of the time.

I also noticed that Joe Carter made the same point that I did about Jesus’ going around healing people, only more forcefully. Actually, I’m a bit uncomfortable with making it that forcefully, because I think we have to recognize how contextual the definition of disease itself is, especially when it is mental. One country’s madman is another one’s shaman; homosexuality used to be a mental illness, and now it’s not. This is not to say it’s all relative, but I think any Christian who has reason to suspect the post-Enlightenment medical model of humanity (which includes everybody at First Things, I would say) should stop and discern before accepting all pronouncements on the subject. Jesus may have made the blind see and the lame walk, but it’s difficult to picture what his healing an adult with the mind of a 10-month-old would look like.

When it comes to persons with diseases of the mind, I invariably find myself thinking of Oliver Sacks. Unfortunately I don’t have a book on hand to quote from directly, but his recurring thesis is that doctors should consider neurology patients, even severely disabled ones, as whole people. In his case I think that’s different from either defining a person by their disability, or imagining the person without it. Rather, it’s saying that every person who has a disability is unique, and will incorporate it into his or her life in sometimes unpredictable ways. In some cases, that means they incorporate it so well that healing it may cause disruption (as blind people whose sight has been suddenly restored often find the experience more frightening and confusing than liberating). However, there are few generalities one can make in that regard, which is why Sacks tends to structure his books as collections of case studies. Before making broad philosophical claims about autonomy and eschatology, that might be a good thing to keep in mind.