On Thursday, April 17, at 6:00 pm, in Drake’s Sussman Theater (lower level of Olmsted Center), Dr. Max Thornton, independent scholar, will deliver a lecture on “Getting What We Deserve: Theologies at the Intersection of Disability and Work.”
Dr. Thornton’s lecture will think through some of the connections between disability, work, and the theological ideas that shape popular views on both in the US. Concepts of punishment for sin, redemptive suffering, and character formation are embedded in the ways we think about both disability and work; the place where they meet is shaped by racialized ideas about labor, poverty, and salvation, as well as the belief that God materially rewards the faithful. Yet disability theology offers an alternative to these habits of thought, asking us to rethink both our definition and our valorization of “work”; to withhold judgments about sin, punishment, redemption, and other metaphorical readings of disability; and to take seriously our shared human vulnerability.
