In this episode we're joined by Professor Maryanne Wolf to discuss Dyslexia. Prof. Wolf is the Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, and the author of a number of books, including Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (published HarperCollins), and Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (also published by HarperCollins). In our conversation, Prof. Wolf explains to us that reading is an invention, and that the human brain was never intended to read. We have to build a circuit in the brain in order to read; we don’t enter the world equipped to do so. People with Dyslexia, though, have a differently organized brain, with patterns of organization that pre-date our invention of literacy and numeracy. As Prof. Wolf emphasizes, there are advantages that come with these differently organized brains, such as creativity, entrepreneurship, and non-linear thinking. Thus, Dyslexia is something to be understood, rather than overcome. Team members on the episode from The Two Cities include: Dr. Amber Bowen, Dr. John Anthony Dunne, Stephanie Kate Judd, Rev. Daniel Parham, Dr. Madison Pierce. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode we’re talking about Dementia with Prof. John Swinton, who is Chair of Divinity and Religious Studies and Professor of Theology at the University of Aberdeen (in Scotland). Prof. Swinton is also a Registered Mental Nurse (RMN) and a Registered Nurse for People with Learning Disabilities (RNMD), and the author of a number of books, including, Dementia: Living in the Memories of God (published by Eerdmans) and Becoming Friends of Time: Disability, Timefullness, and Gentle Discipleship (published by Baylor University Press). In our conversation we talk about what led Prof. Swinton into theological work on Dementia, and as the discussion unfolds Prof. Swinton addresses models of personhood in relation to memory, overly dualist/rationalist conceptions of who we are as humans, and the importance of relationality and communality as people. Theologically, we talk about what it means to know God, when you’ve forgotten who God is, and the importance of situating personhood in Christ and the importance of being held in God’s memory of us. Team members on the episode from The Two Cities include: Dr. John Anthony Dunne, Stephanie Kate Judd, and Rev. Dr. Chris Porter. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Continuing our series on disability and theology, we conclude our look at textual matters within this series by looking at protagonists and their impairments in early Christian literature with Dr. Kylie Crabbe, who is Senior Research Fellow in Biblical and Early Christian Studies, and Director of Graduate Research Programs for the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, which is part of Australian Catholic University. She holds a current Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from the Australian Research Council (2022-2024) for her project ‘Inside Others: Early Christian Protagonists and Their Impairments’. Over the course of our conversation, we discuss the function of the impairments of protagonists within early Christian texts. In particular, we look at the infertility of Elizabeth in the Gospel of Luke, the representation of John in the apocryphal Acts of John, and the representation of Peter’s daughter in the apocryphal Acts of Peter. As we do so we juxtapose this discussion with the representation of Paul within the canonical book of Acts relative to his description of himself in his letters. Dr. Crabbe is keen to point out the differences at work when a character with an impairment is the main character in their own story rather than a peripheral character whose purpose is to show us something about the unimpaired protagonist. Team members on the episode from The Two Cities include: Dr. John Anthony Dunne, Stephanie Kate Judd, and Rev. Dr. Chris Porter. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Continuing our series on Disability & Theology we are joined by Dr. Meghan Henning to talk about Hell & Disability in Early Christian Literature. Dr. Henning is Associate Professor of Christian Origins and the Director of Undergraduate Programs at the University of Dayton (in Ohio), and the author of Hell Hath No Fury: Gender, Disability, and the Invention of Damned Bodies in Early Christian Literature (published by Yale University Press). At the outset of our conversation, Dr. Henning shares her personal and familial experience with disability and how that led her into disability studies, and from there the bulk of our conversation is focused on the representation of damned bodies in Hell within early Christian literature, particularly apocalyptic texts from the first few centuries of Christianity. Notably, Dr. Henning highlights the way that bodies in Hell are generally depicted as effeminate and disabled, which is a distinct development within Christian texts relative to broader culture, and she explains how/why this link would have been made in the ancient world. This conversation covers a difficult topic, but it highlights the way that ableism and misogyny, among other things, affects early Christian reflection on the afterlife, which ought to challenge our contemporary perspectives on disability, gender, and eschatology. Team members on the episode from The Two Cities include: Dr. John Anthony Dunne and Stephanie Kate Judd. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode we discuss Disability in the Greco-Roman World and the New Testament with Dr. Louise Gosbell, who is Principal of Mary Andrews College in Sydney, Australia, and the author of The Poor, The Crippled, The Blind, and the Lame: Physical and Sensory Disability in the Gospels of the New Testament (published by Mohr Siebeck). At the outset of our conversation, Dr. Gosbell shares her personal story struggling with chronic health issues that have developed into a disability, as well as the way that disability has affected her wider family. Over the course of our conversation, we discuss the Great Banquet of Luke 14, the woman with the issue of blood, and the man born blind in John 9. As Dr. Gosbell emphasizes with us, disability is not a static experience, either in the ancient world or the modern one, and is an inevitable reality rather than a rare experience. Thus, our accommodation and our framework towards disability needs to shift so that we are much more intentional around disability in our churches, including in our teachings and in our practices. Team Members on the episode from The Two Cities include: Dr. Grace Emmett, Stephanie Kate Judd, and Rev. Dr. Chris Porter.Series Disclaimer: We know that this space is fraught, and we don’t speak for every PWD. We may inevitably get some things wrong in this series, but we ask for your patience in advance since we think it’s more important to have the conversation than shy away from it out of fear of saying the wrong thing. At the same time, this is a learning process for all of us, and we want to maintain a posture of learning throughout the series and beyond. Thanks for listening! Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the second episode of our series on disability, we discuss blindness in the Hebrew Bible with Dr. Eric Harvey, who holds a PhD from Brandeis University in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, with a specialization in Bible and the Ancient Near East. Dr. Harvey also recently held a digital humanities post-doctoral fellowship at the center for spatial and textual analysis at Stanford University, and he blogs at blindscholar.com. Throughout our conversation, Dr. Harvey shares his personal story of becoming legally blind during his doctoral studies, and how his experience led him to reassess the construct of blindness in the Hebrew Bible. In particular, he addresses the passages that use the saying “having eyes, but not seeing” in the Psalms, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah, highlighting how the line itself does not pertain to the same reality (sometimes it relates to moral disobedience and idols, and only once does it actually refer to literal blindness). As we continue on, Dr. Harvey explains how he takes a historicist view of disability in biblical texts, as opposed to a redemptionist or a rejectionist approach (drawing upon the taxonomy of the late Prof. Hector Avalos). Dr. Harvey emphasizes how the biblical fascination with healing, and the contemporary hope in it, leaves people with the trauma of not experiencing such healing and also without much reflection on what faithful living looks like with the bodies that one has. Team members on the episode from The Two Cities include: Stephanie Kate Judd and Dr. Madison Pierce.Series Disclaimer: We know that this space is fraught, and we don’t speak for every PWD. We may inevitably get some things wrong in this series, but we ask for your patience in advance since we think it’s more important to have the conversation than shy away from it out of fear of saying the wrong thing. At the same time, this is a learning process for all of us, and we want to maintain a posture of learning throughout the series and beyond. Thanks for listening! Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode is the first episode in our series on disability and theology, in which we’re joined by Prof. John Swinton, who is Chair of Divinity and Religious Studies and Professor of Theology at the University of Aberdeen (in Scotland). Prof. Swinton is also a Registered Mental Nurse (RMN) and a Registered Nurse for People with Learning Disabilities (RNMD), and the author of a number of books, including, Dementia: Living in the Memories of God (published by Eerdmans). In this conversation Prof. Swinton provides us with an overview of key terms and methodologies within the field of Disability studies as well as theological conversations around disability to help set up the conversations in our series. In addition to some of those foundational concepts and topics, Prof. Swinton also shares with us some of his insights surrounding the importance of personhood, belonging, dependence, participating in the Body of Christ, our conceptions of time, and the nature of resurrected bodies. Team members on the episode from The Two Cities include: Dr. John Anthony Dunne, Dr. Grace Emmett, Stephanie Kate Judd, Dr. Madison Pierce, and Rev. Dr. Chris Porter.Series Disclaimer: We know that this space is fraught, and we don’t speak for every PWD. We may inevitably get some things wrong in this series, but we ask for your patience in advance since we think it’s more important to have the conversation than shy away from it out of fear of saying the wrong thing. At the same time, this is a learning process for all of us, and we want to maintain a posture of learning throughout the series and beyond. Thanks for listening! Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode we talk about limits with Dr. Kelly Kapic, who is Professor of Theological Studies at Covenant College (in Lookout Mountain, Georgia), and the author of You’re Only Human: How Our Limits Reflect God’s Design and Why That’s Good News (published by Brazos). Over the course of our conversation, Dr. Kapic talks about the importance of human limitation and how it should be considered from within a theology of creation. In particular, he highlights that we should not feel guilty for our lack of productivity at the end of the day, but neither should we give in to a one-sided emphasis on how our identity is unrelated to the work that we do  or the bodies that we have. We want to avoid a hyper self-reliance on the one hand, and Gnosticism on the other. This conversation helpfully sets up the series that we have planned next on Disability and Theology. Team members on the episode from The Two Cities include: Stephanie Kate Judd, Dr. Madison Pierce, Rev. Dr. Chris Porter, and Dr. Sydney Tooth. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode we’re joined by Dr. Christopher Watkin to talk about Biblical Critical Theory. Dr. Watkin is Senior Lecturer in French Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and he’s the author of Biblical Critical Theory: How The Bible’s Unfolding Story Makes Sense of Modern Life and Culture (published by Zondervan). In our conversation, Dr. Watkin talks about how all critical theories speak out against the status quo, and that the Bible itself offers us a storied version of a critical theory. In particular, Dr. Watkin emphasizes how the story of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, invites Christians to a third way to approach culture that is neither simply demolitional nor straightforwardly affirming. It does so, he contends, not as a metanarrative, but as a mesonarrative, a story that unfolds in the midst of history rather than standing over and above it. As he explains, all critical theories make life viable, visible, valuable, and the Bible’s own critical theory does so as well. Team members on the episode from The Two Cities include: Dr. Amber Bowen, Dr. John Anthony Dunne, Stephanie Kate Judd, Rev. Daniel Parham, and Rev. Dr. Chris Porter. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode we discuss whether "tongues" in 1 Corinthians refer to ecstatic and unintelligible speech, or whether they refer to multilingualism. For this conversation we’re joined by Dr. Ekaputra Tupamahu, who is Assistant Professor of New Testament at Portland Seminary and George Fox University, and the author of the new book that we’re discussing on this episode, Contesting Languages: Heteroglossia and the Politics of Language in the Early Church (published by Oxford University Press). In our conversation, Dr. Tupamahu explains to us how he approaches this topic as someone with a Pentecostal background, and as an immigrant to the United States who formerly pastored a multilingual church in southern California. Essentially, Dr. Tupamahu argues that Paul’s rhetorical strategy for navigating a multilingual context is to defer to the majority language, unless a translation in the majority language can be provided to the whole community, which creates some difficulty as we approach 1 Corinthians in the light of multilingualism today. Team Members on the episode from The Two Cities include: Dr. John Anthony Dunne, Jennifer Guo, Rev. Daniel Parham, Dr. Logan Williams, and introducing for the first time, Dr. Sydney Tooth. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.