May 4, 2012

Debut album by Jiminy Finn and the Moneydiggers!





I'm pleased to announce the official release of the new album, "Campfire Carols," by Jiminy Finn and the Moneydiggers!


Tracklist:

1. Into the Woods
2. Lo Que Sea
3. I Guess I Want To Be With You
4. I've Got to Write a Song Tonight
5. Yes, I'm a Music Snob (What of it?)
6. Universal Love Song
7. All Day Every Day (Beatmaster)
8. We're Sticking it to the Man, He Just Doesn't Know it Yet
9. How Happiness Destroyed My Band
10. Before You Came
11. Frankie's House
12. The Shameless Self-Promotion Song
13. Dennis
14. Hidden/Bonus Track: Paul Revere

Click here to download the free mp3 of "I've Got to Write a Song Tonight." And dance. 

Enjoy a few low-quality excerpts below to give you a taste for the goodness of this compilation. Of course, the actual tracks sound much better.



Buy it now for a mere $10 (+shipping), secured through paypal:


Check us out at facebook.com/themoneydiggers. We're just a couple of guys who are up to pure good. Started making music in the neighborhood. 

April 21, 2012

New Album from Jiminy Finn and the Moneydiggers!




I'm pleased to announce the official release of the new album, "Campfire Carols," by Jiminy Finn and the Moneydiggers!


Tracklist:

1. Into the Woods
2. Lo Que Sea
3. I Guess I Want To Be With You
4. I've Got to Write a Song Tonight
5. Yes, I'm a Music Snob (What of it?)
6. Universal Love Song
7. All Day Every Day (Beatmaster)
8. We're Sticking it to the Man, He Just Doesn't Know it Yet
9. How Happiness Destroyed My Band
10. Before You Came
11. Frankie's House
12. The Shameless Self-Promotion Song
13. Dennis
14. Hidden/Bonus Track: Paul Revere

Enjoy a few low-quality excerpts below to give you a taste for the goodness of this compilation. Of course, the actual tracks sound much better.




Buy it now for a mere $10 (+shipping), secured through paypal:


Check us out at facebook.com/themoneydiggers. We're just a couple of guys who are up to pure good. Started making music in the neighborhood. 

April 20, 2012

Help Us Raise Money to Fight ALS

Pardon this intrusion to my regular blogging fare. I'm posting a letter written by Kristen, my spouse. Late last year her mother Vicki was diagnosed with ALS, commonly called Lou Gehrig's Disease. We're participating in a fundraiser for research toward a cure and need your help.

Dear Family and Friends,

As some of you already know, and some are just now learning, my mom Vicki Ullrich was diagnosed with ALS (commonly referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease) in October 2011. This is a cruel and fatal disease, and because so few people are diagnosed with it (about 2 people out of 100,000), there has not been as much research surrounding its causes and there is no known cure.

I'm doing something really exciting to do my part to further ALS research, and I hope you will consider helping me! My husband Blair and I recently signed on to help raise funds to support the Robert Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins by participating in the 6th Annual Fiesta 5K and Walk on May 5, 2012. I hope that you can help support me in this important project by contributing whatever you can.

Funds raised from the Fiesta 5K will be dedicated to aggressive scientific research focused on understanding the causes of ALS, investigating effective treatments for it, and finding a cure. Every dollar makes a difference. It is easy to make a donation online using the link below. Whatever you can give will help - it all adds up! I greatly appreciate your support and will keep you posted on my progress. For more information about this volunteer fundraiser and its programs, you can visit the Web site.

If you know my mom from church, school, work, or anywhere else, you probably know her as a thoughtful and dedicated single mother, teacher, and friend. She is the type of person who loves working on projects, being on-the-go, traveling, and normally doesn't sit still for very long. This disease has completely changed her life in a matter of months. My hope is to aid ALS research so that fewer people in the future, whether patients or their family members, have to face such a diagnosis.

Sincerely,

Kristen Ullrich Hodges

To make a donation online, click here to visit my personal page.

If the text above does not appear as a clickable link, you can visit the web address:
http://support.alscenter.org/site/TR?px=1125869&pg=personal&fr_id=1100&et=CPQaF4eSJjHLPlTJxY9RAQ&s_tafId=4010


Click here to view the team page for Team Ullrich

If the text above does not appear as a clickable link, you can visit the web address:
http://support.alscenter.org/site/TR?team_id=4210&pg=team&fr_id=1100&et=SusDwU0XlyNDKkSbJqZ6BQ&s_tafId=4010

March 20, 2012

What has the “Joseph Smith Papers Project” to do with Islam?


Or, “an ode to invested Latter-day Saint history”
***
Yesterday, various bloggers and writers were invited to a meeting with the editors of the most recent volume of the Joseph Smith Papers Project to discuss the new “Histories” volume. This post is partially a reflection on that event, and you can expect other blog posts and reviews to come.
***

In a revelation dictated on the day of his church’s founding, Smith reported God’s command: “there shall be a record kept among you.”1 And so it was; with various fits and starts the early Saints strove to fulfill what they took to be a divine mandate. Mormon history, from the very beginning, was invested. It was Mormon history. Much of our earliest material was recorded under the dictation, direction or influence of Joseph Smith. It doesn’t take a genius or a meticulous historian to recognize that such records will carry deeply impressed fingerprints of the personalities, prejudices, and perspectives of those doing the recording. And such records are invested.

You might sense a problem with this. We want people to simply tell it like it is, enough cheerleading, tell the truth, lay everything bare. However, I’m suggesting that those who complain loudest about the obviously-partisan nature of official accounts might find it more fruitful to deeply consider the initial impulses behind the records Mormons kept. Why did they record this and not that? What are they focusing on, and what seems to escape their gaze altogether? Invested history won’t often provide distanced, dry, meticulous, disconnected accounts though the stuff from which it is crafted might very well seem less-than-exciting. I’m asking you instead to conceive of our earliest historical accounts with close attention to their context. Such accounts include personal witnesses of spiritual experiences (visions of the heavens, visitations from heavenly beings), shot through with political, economic, and social concerns. Words like “bias” and “objectivity” should give way to words like “perspective” and “values.”

Perhaps this is the grand secret of understanding Mormon history! The records are imperfect—sometimes quite foreign—ranging from the boring to the majestic, encompassing the mundane, the marvelous, and even the over-the-top. And the gaps, oh! those damnable gaps! and the hints at records now lost, probably forever, to the ravages of the moth or flame!

So, what does this have to do with Islam? I recently read an interesting book called Full Sails Ahead by a Moroccan Muslim scholar/activist named Nadia Yassine. Billed as a “frank examination of Islamic history and critical assessment of the relation between Islam and…the past,” the book enacts the author’s understanding of the importance of historical perspective for religious faith. Part of the reason contemporary Muslim countries have witnessed scientific, political, and cultural decline to various degrees is because they are not living true to the best in their history, she argues. And this isn’t entirely their fault, as some of their early recorded history is imperfect. Toward the conclusion of her book Yassine takes a moment to describe the early Islamic “chronicler,” who in the 600s AD recorded a “flat image of the facts”:

It is true that when you read history in the records of the great chroniclers like Tabari, for instance, you feel a certain annoyance before this monotonous delivery of accounts that are not linked by any main theme or historical framework. Fragmented chronicles for a fragmented history!
We thus inherit an accumulation of impersonal accounts of unequal importance yet presented on the same scale of value. In the same detached style, for instance, we are informed that Sukayana…had very beautiful hair and that her father’s head was slit by Yazid Ibn Mu’awiya. Such unflappability, as we might call it, in the face of events produces an uninteresting and impersonal history, wanting in the power of events. So flat and blurred are its accounts that the fleeting periods of time it attempts to capture seem easily interchangeable.2

“Fragmented chronicles for a fragmented history” indeed! Upon reading this excerpt I immediately thought of the most recent "Journals" volume (2) of the Joseph Smith Papers Project. It covers December 1841-April 1843. The volume’s editors describe this as “a seventeen-month period marked by the continued growth of the church, significant doctrinal developments, the ongoing settlement of the Nauvoo community, and the maturing of Joseph Smith as a political and religious leader.” As for the journals, they “note both the momentous and the mundane,” and it could be easy to slip into detecting the sort of one-dimensional “unflappability” Yassine has noticed in early Islamic chronicles.3 Multiple entries noting that Joseph spent the day chopping wood or snow sledding with his son are recorded alongside accounts of doctrinal debates he had about the Millerites, exhortations to complete the Temple and Nauvoo House, letters written to the Illinois Governor, sketches of real-time astronomical events interpreted as signs of the end times, and fragmentary sermon excerpts. Most readers aren’t likely to sit down and read this one straight through—especially those bored by accounts of selling property, legal proceedings, and medical malpractice. But this fragmentary record is immensely valuable, a strange combination engulfing the personal and the impersonal.

If the “Journals” volumes represent more of the fragments and scraps of our past, we also have a wealth of early Mormon documents which draw upon that chaos to make order. Yassine complained of the “monotonous delivery of accounts that are not linked by any main theme or historical framework” in early Islamic chronicles. Our early Church made efforts to provide just such a framework, much to our appreciation and despite our ongoing uneasiness with partisan and selective nature of the records. The history they recorded is invested, and we’re glad! Enter the newest volume in the ongoing papers series: Histories, Volume 1: Joseph Smith Histories, 1832–1844.

This new volume presents “the six personal and church histories written, dictated, or closely supervised by Joseph Smith” prior to his death.4 Early Latter-day Saints sought to give explicit narrative shape to their experiences as they understood them. They self-published narratives in Church newspapers, pamphlets and books. Near the end of his life, Joseph Smith provided a narrative overview to Daniel Rupp, who compiled an encyclopedia called An Original History of the Religious Denominations at Present Existing in the United States (Philadelphia, 1844). This account drew on the earlier Wentworth Letter, which in turn drew on Orson Pratt’s “Remarkable Visions” pamphlet, which in turn drew from other accounts. This regress of reference is being untangled as more and more records are being meticulously transcribed and published for the Joseph Smith Papers Project, giving us easier, more intimate, and unprecedented access to our early church history.

While leafing through these records a variety of questions should fill our minds. One prominent question of late goes something like this: “Does this match what I remember being taught in Sunday School lessons and Seminary, or reading in official Church manuals?” The folks who teach your classes, the folks who’ve written various official works, most of them are simply doing their best to inculcate in us a sense of belonging to a divine community, to impress on us the moral obligations such membership entails. When this question (somewhat frequently) returns to nag me I try to situate it alongside other questions which I’ve come to understand to be just as crucial, if not more-so:

Why was this record created? When? By whom? For whom? How was it influenced by other records, and what other records were influenced by it? What is highlighted in this record? What is left out? What do these things tell me about the things this writer valued? Which of my questions are likely to be similar to ones that would have made sense to them? Which questions might they have been asking that I haven’t considered?

These aren’t always the questions we encounter in everyday Church meetings, but they can be valuable, and not merely for historical reasons. These are the sorts of questions I had in mind when I said that words like “bias” and “objectivity” should give way to words like “perspective” and “values.” To paraphrase the grandfather of a young man who was once bitten by a radioactive spider, thus acquiring super-human abilities to swing around tall buildings hanging from webs which he shoots from his wrists, “With great access comes great responsibility”. And I would add, great opportunity. There is power in our history. There is power in history, generally. This is why Yassine’s plea to her fellow Muslims is so heavily-grounded in the Islamic past. This is why she pleads with her people to avoid the dichotomy between either ignoring the embarrassing and inconvenient on one had, or losing all confidence and magnifying the warts on the other:

The perception we have of our history ought to be gathered around a methodological analysis that is likely to give us a meaning, stimulating thus in ourselves a need to find our way back [to those better times] again. The best way to regain the summit is to know the paths of descent.5

Latter-day Saints are a history-loving people, but the history we love best ofttimes is the history we find most comfortable to our 21st century sensibilities. The Joseph Smith Papers Project, that remarkable product of our official Church History department, seeks to place all the cards we have on the table. The “documents created by Joseph Smith or by staff whose work he directed, including journals, revelations and translations, contemporary reports of discourses, minutes, business and legal records, editorials, and notices. The project also includes papers received and ‘owned’ by his office, such as incoming correspondence.”6 Early Mormons were invested; that’s why they wrote this stuff. That’s why the stuff they wrote was permeated by that investment. Present Mormons are invested; that’s why the Church publishes this stuff. That’s why we read this stuff. Remember that the story doesn’t tell itself. From the chaos—be it in the form of handwritten journals, newspaper publications, books, and other materials—historians/readers seek to create a bit of order, to add a narrative scope, to tell our invested Mormon stories.



Footnotes:

1. See Revelation, 6 Apr. 1830, in Doctrine and Covenants 46:1, 183 ed. [D&C 21:1]. Dean C. Jessee, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Richard L. Jensen, eds. Journals, Volume 1: 1832–1839, vol. 1 of the Journals series of The Joseph Smith Papers, edited by Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, and Richard Lyman Bushman (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2008), xxxv.

2. Nadia Yassine, Full Sails Ahead (Iowa City: Justice and Spirituality Publishing, 2006), 206.

3. “Volume 2 Introduction,” Andrew H. Hedges, Alex D. Smith, Richard Lloyd Anderson, eds., Journals, Volume 2: December 1841-April 1843, vol. 2 of the Journals series of The Joseph Smith Papers, edited by Dean C. Jessee, Ronald K. Esplin, and Richard Lyman Bushman (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2011), xiii, xxxi.

4. ”Published Volumes,” josephsmithpapers.org/publishedVolumes (accessed 20 March 2012). The six histories that Joseph Smith personally wrote, dictated, or supervised includes: History, circa Summer 1832; History, 1834-1836; History Drafts, 1838-circa 1841; ”Extract, from the Private Journal of Joseph Smith Jr.,” July 1839; ”Church History” (familiarly known as the “Wentworth Letter”) 1 March 1842; ”Latter Day Saints,” 1844. Also, Appendix: Orson Pratt, A[n] Interesting Account of Several Remarkable Visions, 1840.

5. Yassine, Ibid. As you guessed by now, this post’s title was partly a ploy to draw your interest. But Yassine’s observations on the importance of history, and her attention to the nature of recorded history and how that nature affects our present circumstances, contain the main point I hope to communicate here.

6. “About the Project,” josephsmithpapers.org/aboutTheProject (accessed 20 March 2012).

February 14, 2012

Review: Molly C. Haslam, “A Constructive Theology of Intellectual Disability”


Title: A Constructive Theology of Intellectual Disability: Human Being As Mutuality and Response
Author: Molly C. Haslam
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Genre: Theology
Year: 2012
Pages: 134
Binding: Paperback
ISBN13: 978-0-8232-3941-2
Price: $24.00

Here’s another (perhaps over-long) review. For busy folks I've included a little synopsis of the review:

SYNOPSIS: Theologian/physical therapist Molly Haslam claims that Christian theology is biased by defining “human being” according to things like agency, rationality, and intelligence. Such anthropologies marginalize people with profound intellectual disabilities. She describes several recent attempts to account for the disabled in Christian theology. They’re inadequate for her because they still seem to privilege the rational self. She seeks to construct a theology which explains how people with severe intellectual disabilities can be seen as being created in the image of God. Her account is excellent despite a few blind spots, and it has interesting implications for how a Mormon theology of intellectual disability might look. Above all, it very fruitfully invites you, good reader, to think about what it means to be human.

Now for the full review.

Chan was born with cerebral palsy. At age twenty he functions with an IQ level of about 20—somewhere near the level of an infant. He can’t roll over or hold his head upright. It seems he can’t understand or produce words or sentences, nor can he use or interpret gestures. It also seems Chan can’t self-reflect, symbolize a goal, or act with intention to achieve one. His caregivers describe his behavior as being alternately “awake oriented” and “sleep oriented.” They try to discern patterns when Chan exhibits such behaviors. They look for messages in eye movement, heart rate, and muscle tension. They believe Chan acts at a “preintentional” level; that he responds to the world around him without conscious intention and the world around him can in turn respond to him. Molly C. Haslam, a physical therapist and theologian, turns to Chan and other people with “profound intellectual disabilities” to better understand what it means to be human (57-65). What can Chan tell us about who we are, about who God is, and about our relationships to each other? Those questions are the main theme of Haslam’s A Constructive Theology of Intellectual Disability.

With the rise of a disability rights movement over the past hundred and fifty years, various “models” have been created to frame disability. The “vocational model” sees disability in terms of impact on ability to work, thus measures are taken to provide education, training, and job opportunities for the disabled. The “medical model” has promoted “important medical advances,” but “professional control” often wins out over “empowerment of the individual” (10). The “minority group model” tries to overturn societal barriers against and stigmatization of the disabled. This model has been useful in helping Haslam identify ways which “our theological categories perpetuate this stigmatization,” but she believes it misses complexity—”individuals with disabilities experience disability differently” (11). Thus, one more model, the “limits model,” is helpful for Haslam’s purposes. It emphasizes that embodiment is multifaceted, it “begins with the notion of limits as a common, indeed quite unsurprising, aspect of being human.” Everyone has limits in varying degrees (12). Using these last two models, Haslam explains how “our theological categories perpetuate the stigmatization” the intellectually disabled because they fail “to account for the full humanity of these individuals” (13).

According to Haslam, Christian theology has usually defined humans in substantialist terms. ”Christianity came to life in a culture infused with Neoplatonic philosophy and its privileging of the world of ideas over the material world” (14). A person’s intellect matters more than their body (Aquinas, Calvin). Several recent theologians have recognized this bias which places human nature on the “inside” (Reynolds, Yong, Reinders). In order to account for human disability they try an “outside” approach by defining humanity in relational terms. A person is a human in that they are created, recognized or accepted as such by God or caregivers. Haslam sees these new attempts as a “hopeful sign” (3), but not good enough. They either define humans as utterly passive, thus not reflective of an active God (and we’re supposed to be “created in his image”), or they still locate humanity in a particular capacity: a person’s agency, the ability to understand one as a differentiated self, a being capable of symbolic or goal-directed behavior, understanding oneself as loved by another.

In part one Haslam explains and argues against Gordon Kaufman‘s view of the human as “intellectual agent” (19-35) and in part two she does the same for George Lindbeck‘s view of human being as “language user” (36-52). Throughout the rest of the book Haslam seeks to construct a view of humans which is “life-giving” even for the intellectually disabled, something she argues the other accounts fail to do:

Rather than turn ‘inside’ the self and ground our concept of human being in a particular capacity, or rather than turn ‘outside’ the human being and construct a theological anthropology based on the movement of the other toward us, I suggest that we employ a more holistic understanding of the God/world relation….I suggest that we locate our understanding of human being not on one or the other side of the subject/object dichotomy but in the realm of ‘the between.’ We find our humanity in relationships of mutual responsiveness, in which individuals with profound intellectual disabilities participate as responders, albeit in nonsymbolic, nonagential ways…they do express the ability to respond to the world around them and to evoke a response from others (8).

I described much of part three in this review’s introduction. Haslam presents “a phenomenology of human beings in relational terms” by describing Chan, his daily routine, his caregivers, and the relationships that exist between them (53-66). The detailed account gave me a sense of Haslam’s deep familiarity with people of profound intellectual disability, to which she attributes “the passion that invoked” the book to begin with (10, 18). She acknowledges the “risk of misinterpreting their behavior,” but sees “no other choice” other than remaining silent, thus failing to advocate or learn from the disabled (17). Chan’s behavior seems to indicate that “he is able to respond to the world around him,and those around him respond in turn to the changes in Chan’s behavior,” setting up her main argument that “mutually responsive relationships are possible for these individuals, even when symbolization and conceptualization are not” (64). Human being is “dynamic,” not static, “a relational concept” based on “the capacity for responsiveness, but always a responsiveness in relation to an other and never the capacity for responsiveness in and of itself” (66).1

This touching, sometimes unsettling depiction of Chan sets us up for part four where Haslam outlines Martin Buber‘s account of “I-It” and “I-Thou” relationships (67-91). In an “I-It” relationship, a person sees another person, conceives of another person as a whole, an object, a reduction of what they actually are (68-9). Whenever we reflect on another being we turn them into an “it,” a tool, a utility, and this is “the melancholy of our fate,” Buber says (79). In contrast, an “I-Thou” relation is immediate, total, mutual, sheer presence without categorizing (69-70). Haslam stunningly describes this relation as requiring “both will and grace” (72):

Meeting the Thou requires both my activity and my passivity, my choosing and being chosen. It requires my activity as I go my own way and meet the Thou, in the sense that I must…await its presence. But it requires more than my activity alone. Ultimately, meeting the Thou requires activity on the part of the Thou as the Thou is going his own way and meets me. This is grace in the sense that meeting cannot take place as a result of my own act alone; it requires that the Thou give itself to me (72).
Buber and Haslam see such relations existing not only between human and human, but with animals, nature, and God (72-3). “Relation is mutual…we are moulded by our pupils…[and] are educated by our children and by animals!” (73). Most important to Haslam’s project, I-Thou as opposed to I-It relations aren’t merely accessible to people with profound intellectual disabilities, they are most especially accessible to them above all: “In the case of Chan, his behavior gives no indication that he is able to employ conceptual material sufficiently to perform the categorizing, organizing, objectifying functions of the I-It relations” (77, 81). By the very fact of existing, others offer themselves at the same time that they help create us. “Although Chan may not be able to offer grace in the form of consciously choosing to enter into relationship, he would be able to offer grace in the form of his bodied presence which I encounter and which calls for my response” (82).

The final chapter explores the traditional theological concept of imago Dei, a Latin term referring to God’s words, “let us make humankind in our own image” (Genesis 1:26-27; 5:1-3; 9:5-6). This has been interpreted to mean a variety of things typically divided up into two perspectives. First, a “substantialist conception” sees imago Dei as referring to human possession of “some quality, capacity, or characteristic inherent in its creaturely substance that renders it similar to God” (93). This can include physical resemblance, but some emphasize God’s giving humans “dominion” over creation more. Thus humans are higher, better than animals and nature, a view which Haslam believes has resulted in the “devaluation and often abuse of animals and inanimate objects” including the disabled (94). The second perspective of imago Dei is the “relational conception.” The image of God is something that occurs as a result of the relationship between God and human (94). It is a relation, a way of doing or being, rather than a characteristic.

This has crucial implications for how humans are understood in relation to God (and, as an aside, is one of the most critical theological points of contact between Mormon and “traditional” creedal Christianity, one which helps merit us the label of “non-Christian” or “cult” by a few theologians). Consider Aquinas’s chain of being, a continuum of god-like beings. Some things, he says, image God in that they simply exist, others in that they also live, and finally, some because they “know or understand” (96). Humans have intellect, memory, will, thus the ability to love God, thus they image God, albeit imperfectly (97). But how would Chan image God in this view?

Haslam describes Martin Luther’s view of the imago Dei as being determined by human response to God’s unmerited, free gift of love. There “is no ‘remnant’ of the image in humanity that has ‘fallen’…no quality or capacity inherent in human being that continues to reflect God’s image” (95). Haslam likewise characterizes Calvin as using such a “reflection” model, more relational than substantialist. Humanity is fallen, must turn to God, and thereby reflect His will in their lives (99). While inanimate objects bear God’s image “through their splendor, complexity, and beauty,” humans do so when they “consciously acknowledge their dependence on God and give God their obedience” (101). Because this still requires an ability to conceive of a self and an other (God), and the ability to respond knowingly, Haslam says Calvin fails to account for Chan too.2

Ultimately, Haslam turns to the concept of God as “yearning” in order to find the imago Dei in a way that would include Chan and others with profound intellectual disabilities. The Bible most often depicts God anthropomorphically as a being who creates and sustains the world, and who desires above all to have a relationship with humanity (106). He seeks relation in the Garden of Eden, and continues to offer it through covenants, promising faithfulness. In the Bible “God is portrayed as intimately involved with God’s creation, responsive to the concerns of God’s people and desirous of relationship with them” (107). But she turns to Pseudo-Dionysius to prevent her conception of God from becoming a master/slave dialect. This author portrays God as “yearning itself” rather than a distinct person who yearns (108). This concept of God is important to Haslam because she wants a way for Chan to experience God even without being able to consciously know it, and she wants to show how someone like Chan can actually image God. Chan tells her something profound (and perhaps to some, heretical) about God:

These individuals image God not because of some intellectual capacity they possess, but because their participation as responders in relationships is expressive of the longing that God is (110).

Obviously, this approach to the imago Dei has remarkable implications Latter-day Saints. It bears directly on the ways we conceive of things like “intelligence,” “intelligences,” or the human “spirit”, what it means to be “children of God,” the concept of “unrighteous dominion,” the bounds of God’s omnipotence, and the very nature of Zion and celestial life as being rooted in “sociality” (D&C 130:2) among many other under-explored possibilities.3 Haslam doesn’t approach the question of whether some future event (like the resurrection) will result in disabled persons being “added upon” so to speak with more rational capacities, and obviously the subject of pre-mortal spirits is also absent. Various Mormon theologians have wrestled with some of these issues, but none to my knowledge have yet constructed a divine anthropology which consciously accounts for people with severe intellectual disabilities.4

Haslam’s account is rigorous and thorough, but she doesn’t particularly address the question of whether her perceived advantages afforded to the intellectually disabled should be seen an ultimate destination for others. This is a blind spot she recognizes, but doesn’t try to account for. She doesn’t deny that “verbal and intellectual interactions may provide greater depth and complexity in human relationships of mutual love and responsiveness” nor does she “intend to leave behind the capacities for intentionality, symbolization, and linguisticality” (104-5). She is simply trying to resist “those theological anthropologies that locate human being in the possession of a particular capacity” (105). Her account thus suffers somewhat from the same fatal flaw she detects in other accounts in that it rests on a particular human capacity of responsiveness, even if non-symbolic. She recognizes this when she acknowledges there are multiple levels of consciousness. Would Terri Schiavo, a woman who was in a vegetative state, apparently “less aware” than Chan, be considered human based on Haslam’s criteria of responsiveness? Where is the line drawn and why? Haslam says this question has “less to do with [Schiavo's] level of responsiveness and more to do with what levels of responsiveness we consider to be evidence of a life worth living.” Arguments over that issue preceded the decision to terminate her “life” (114). Instead of accounting for these other levels of consciousness Haslam only has space here to hope that her book will prompt further work in that direction. The “traditional distinction between the human and the nonhuman” needs to be examined and broadened, thus impacting “feminist ethic,” “animal rights ethic,” ”disability rights ethic,” and “children’s rights ethic” (115).

To put it all together, Haslam’s overriding and “one important criterion…in determining the adequacy of our religious symbols is the degree to which our symbols reflect an understanding…that is approapriate to the broad spectrum of human experiences” (20). In A Constructive Theology of Intellectual Disability she identifies the theological bias toward rationality which marginalizes those with profound intellectual disabilities, missing out on their part of the spectrum of human experiences. She seeks to construct a theology which explains how such disabled people fit within the imago Dei. They fit because they embody and remind us of God’s quality of longing for response; they can exist in an I-Thou relationship regardless of (or precisely because of a lack of) the ability to reflect upon it.

Her approach tells us a lot about what she believes “THEOLOGY” is. Following theologian Gordon Kaufman, she explains that theology “is not a description of how things ‘really’ are… [because] we cannot get outside of our place within humanity in order to encounter the world or the human beings as objects for examination. Thus, our aim in theological work…is not the determination of whether our theological concepts fit reality. It is the construction of theological concepts that get us where we want to go—concepts that provide us with adequate orientation in life. It is ‘human work emerging out of faith’s own need for more adequate orientation and symbolization’” (19). She recognizes that this dangerously binds theology fast to human culture and assumptions (94), but she has “chosen to accept the risk” because she believes the ways we think about and talk about each other, the definitions we have of “human being,” directly impact how we love one another (17).


____________________________________
Footnotes:

1. Thus Haslam seems to reintroduce the same problem she identified in her previous chapters.

2. Because Haslam is not focused particularly on the problems of grace and works in relation to human salvation, she does not engage in the problem of free will generally. I assume she would locate free will as a characteristic of an intellectual agent. Thus, it would be a concern only for one biased by an intellectual conception of human being.

3. Of course, there are crucial distinctions that must be drawn between what Haslam is describing and what Mormons might describe given our additional canon. Differences require just as much attention. For instance, what would a Mormon account say about Buber’s claim: “there is no ‘nature of human being’ in the sense of some isolatable capacity or metaphysical substance, such as the soul” (67)? Moreover, can Mormons learn from and incorporate insights from non-Mormon theologians and traditions, or re-envision Mormon doctrines in new ways, or are we simply to look through other traditions in order to merely find what we think “Mormonism” already teaches? Joseph Smith said “If men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend themselves” (see fn 9 here). This statement can be read to either support or contradict Haslem and Buber, depending on how it is applied. More on this later.

4. This is a project I hope to begin in the future. Such accounts include those by Truman Madsen (Eternal Man), Blake Ostler (Exploring Mormon Thought series), and most recently, Samuel L. Brown (In Heaven as it is on Earth), though these writers have somewhat different purposes, methods, and thus, ultimate conclusions. Taylor Petrey’s recent piece in Dialogue also touches on similar issues.