Our wounds are not for healing : a theology of incarnation from within dis-abled minds

• Main Author: Newell, Christopher
• Other Authors: Isherwood, Lisa ; King, Anna
• Published: University of Winchester 2015
• Subjects: 259
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.698196

'Our Wounds are not for Healing’ is a journey into a question that is both deeply personal and theo-therapeutic in its seeking connections of the personal with culture and cosmology; can an applied theology rooted in the living ‘tradition’ of feminist and queer theology begin to question classical definitions of the ‘sane’ and ‘insane’? Indeed, does the very process of theological thinking stand as a contemporary and alternative perspective to many psychiatric and psychological models of sanity and insanity still entrenched in the bio-medical, itself embedded in Victorian concepts of fixed diagnostic procedures? May there indeed be a transgressive theology of healing based on radical feminist Christological understanding which speaks as much of anger, chaos, and resistance as it does of peace or reconciliation; may, indeed, these be inclusive of one another rather than dualistic opposites? What is the theological nature of healing for those labelled with having a ‘severe and enduring’ mental illness? Too frequently, theology has addressed issues of mental health from a largely pastoral and detached observational perspective. I would like to ask whether the model of an embodied and experiential theology of disability championed by theologians such as Nancy Eiesland and others can more powerfully and insightfully apply to those who are described as suffering from sever and enduring mental health problems and whether ‘mad’ theologies are waiting to be revealed and told and honoured: theologies which seek a new perspective on the divine/human encounter. Do certain contemporary theological models of chaos, in creation and cosmology, offer a valorised place for those who psycho-chaos ultimately deems to be of little value in western capitalist economies except as the recipients of ‘compassion’?