A LIBRARIAN’S ORIENTATION
What this book explores
Disabled scholar Amy Kenny combines memoir, disability culture, biblical interpretation, and church critique to show how Christian communities often turn disabled bodies into prayer projects, inspirational lessons, or evidence problems. She addresses unsolicited healing prayer, inaccessible worship, ableist readings of Scripture, medical intrusion, pity, and exclusion, while imagining churches organized around disabled wisdom, leadership, interdependence, pleasure, and access.
EDITORIAL NOTE
Why it’s in the Library
Kenny’s first-person authority and scholarly lens help travelers recognize why benevolent intentions can still diminish disabled people. The book moves the question from whether a body will be cured to whether a community will relinquish ableist assumptions and make belonging material. It belongs as a significant disabled Christian intervention into church practice and theology. It does not speak for every disability experience or require disabled readers to share Kenny’s relationship to identity, medicine, prayer, or faith.
Good starting place if…
You want to understand how cure-centered prayer, inaccessible worship, pity, and inspiration narratives can harm disabled people—and what disabled leadership might teach the church.
Know before you begin…
The book discusses medical trauma, discrimination, exclusion, invasive questions, and repeated spiritual pressure around healing. Disability communities are diverse: some people seek cure or treatment, some claim disability identity, and others use different language. Nondisabled readers should not turn Kenny’s testimony into another inspirational object or stop at changed vocabulary. Access requires budgets, policies, communication, sensory and physical design, compensation, shared power, and direct consultation with the people affected.
