Crippled Grace
Disability, Virtue Ethics, and the Good Life
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Baylor University Press
Published:30th Jan '19
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Crippled Grace combines disability studies, Christian theology, philosophy, and psychology to explore what constitutes happiness and how it is achieved. The virtue tradition construes happiness as whole-of-life flourishing earned by practiced habits of virtue. Drawing upon this particular understanding of happiness, Clifton contends that the experience of disability offers significant insight into the practice of virtue, and thereby the good life.
With its origins in the author's experience of adjusting to the challenges of quadriplegia, Crippled Grace considers the diverse experiences of people with a disability as a lens through which to understand happiness and its attainment. Drawing upon the virtue tradition as much as contesting it, Clifton explores the virtues that help to negotiate dependency, resist paternalism, and maximize personal agency. Through his engagement with sources from Aristotle to modern positive psychology, Clifton is able to probe fundamental questions of pain and suffering, reflect on the value of friendship, seek creative ways of conceiving of sexual flourishing, and outline the particular virtues needed to live with unique bodies and brains in a society poorly fitted to their diverse functioning.
Crippled Grace is about and for people with disabilities. Yet, Clifton also understands disability as symbolic of the human condition - human fragility, vulnerability, and embodied limits. First unmasking disability as a bodily and sociocultural construct, Clifton moves on to construct a deeper and more expansive account of flourishing that learns from those with disability, rather than excluding them. In so doing, Clifton shows that the experience of disability has something profound to say about all bodies, about the fragility and happiness of all humans, and about the deeper truths offered us by the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.
Crippled Grace is a wide-ranging reflection on the issues surrounding disability and flourishing. Clifton boldly asks the difficult and confronting questions, recognising his limitations and being prepared to not have comprehensive answers, while still setting a solid framework for understanding the dynamics of flourishing and challenges and issues that are presently hindering it for the disabled community. Paragraph after paragraph the work continues to offer wisdom and insight as Clifton shows a comprehensive awareness of the relevant ethical, practical and theological concerns. -- Christopher Car -- Journal of Contemporary Ministry
This book deserves to be read by anyone interested in the fragility of the human condition and the hope God's grace gives. -- Choice
[Clifton] also manages to combine personal honesty with sophisticated reflection, a feat too rare in academic theology today. This is truly a book all who want to work in theology and disability should read, because it is thoughtful, brutally honest, deeply reflective, and methodologically sophisticated. -- Aaron Klink -- Reading Religion
Clifton has convinced me that what my congregation needs is not wheelchair ramps and ADA-approved restrooms so much as a wrecking ball taken to its Sunday-best pretenses.... Crippled Grace helps us see, regardless of ability, that this sort of frank admission of brokenness-and a candid willingness to be dependent upon God or others-is the path to happiness. -- Jason Micheli -- The Christian Century
Clifton forges into new territory and produces perhaps the most thorough work by a Pentecostal scholar on disability and suffering and surely the most important work on this topic since Amos Yong's Theology and Down Syndrome (Baylor University Press, 2007). I heartily endorse this work as a primary textbook for disability studies, ethics, and human relationships, as well as secondary and recommended reading for Pentecostal-specific courses with emphases upon healing, prophetic justice, suffering, and practical theology. This work also deserves a wide readership among pastors, particularly those engaged in pastoral care, and all readers interested in ministry to, from, and with our friends in the disability community. -- Martin W. Mittelstadt -- Pneuma: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies
Crippled Grace belongs in our library of ethics as envisioned by disabled people - exemplifying how disabled people actively develop and enact virtues for living a good life specific to our realities. -- Alise de Bie -- Disability and Society
ISBN: 9781481307475
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
285 pages