How Do We Pray When There is No Cure? Disability and an Alternative Vision of Health and Wholeness
Sarah Catherine Carter, Theology, Medicine and Culture Fellow, Duke Divinity School
Gerald McKenny identifies modern biomedicine as part of the “Baconian project,” a scientific venture inspired by the philosophy of Francis Bacon. The Baconian project encapsulates Western society’s mechanistic view of the natural world and its ensuing effort to master nature for humanity’s good.[1] In modern medicine, the Baconian project manifests itself in medicine’s pursuit to ‘defeat’ disease and end all suffering by technological means. Disability problematizes this orientation of modern medicine. In the Baconian framework, health entails the absence of disease, impairment, or suffering. Such a view of health precludes people with disabilities from participating in health and limits our imagination of what healing can entail for disabled people. Encounters with people whose conditions have no cure and those who identify strongly with their disabilities prompt questions of both the limits of the Baconian project and how our vision of health can be expanded to include people with disabilities.
This paper addresses the need for an alternative imagination of health by attending to the experiences of disabled people alongside insights from disability studies and disability theology. In particular, the paper focuses on experiences with and insights into disability shared with the author by a Baptist pastor with osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic bone disorder. Based on her experience of disability, the pastor suggests that courage and wisdom are often more appropriate objects of prayer for her than physical healing. The lived experiences of disabled people offer us a different vision of health and wholeness that does not require a cure and can coexist with disability, and this paper argues that the question of how we can pray for disabled people, answered by disabled people, can gesture toward what this alternate vision looks like. By placing this particular pastor’s reflections on disability and prayer into conversation with voices in disability theology and disability studies, we can discover an understanding of healing and wholeness that reveals the limits of the Baconian project as it extends beyond the cures offered by modern medicine.
[1] Gerald P. McKenny, “Bioethics, the Body, and the Legacy of Bacon,” in On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics, ed. Stephen E. Lammers and Allen Verhey, 2nd ed. (Williams B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1998), p. 312.
This paper addresses the need for an alternative imagination of health by attending to the experiences of disabled people alongside insights from disability studies and disability theology. In particular, the paper focuses on experiences with and insights into disability shared with the author by a Baptist pastor with osteogenesis imperfecta, a genetic bone disorder. Based on her experience of disability, the pastor suggests that courage and wisdom are often more appropriate objects of prayer for her than physical healing. The lived experiences of disabled people offer us a different vision of health and wholeness that does not require a cure and can coexist with disability, and this paper argues that the question of how we can pray for disabled people, answered by disabled people, can gesture toward what this alternate vision looks like. By placing this particular pastor’s reflections on disability and prayer into conversation with voices in disability theology and disability studies, we can discover an understanding of healing and wholeness that reveals the limits of the Baconian project as it extends beyond the cures offered by modern medicine.
[1] Gerald P. McKenny, “Bioethics, the Body, and the Legacy of Bacon,” in On Moral Medicine: Theological Perspectives in Medical Ethics, ed. Stephen E. Lammers and Allen Verhey, 2nd ed. (Williams B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1998), p. 312.