Season 5 Episode 1: Crip Wisdom with Emma, Greg, Michelle, and Cathy

We're so excited to be back on the Mad and Crip Theology Podcast! Miriam sits down with Emma (new co-editor and co-host!), Greg, Michelle, and Cathy to talk about their publication in the latest issue of The Canadian Journal of Theology, Mental Health, and Disability: (Re)Defining Disability Theology: Returning to Its Liberatory Roots

Here's the abstract: Rather than being a liberation theology by and for disabled people, as put forth by Nancy Eiesland in The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability, disability theology has diverged from its roots as evidenced by a paucity of disabled representation and perspectives in scholarship. Without this representation, theological discussions on disability are not wholly empowering. The current work demonstrates our efforts to recenter disabled contributions to the field by outlining: 1) the history of disability theology situated in its roots of liberation theology and disability rights, 2) reasons for re-defining disability theology, 3) the outcomes of a recent conference workshop where disabled participants were asked to redefine disability theology, and 4) deeper considerations of themes from participant responses. In centering our own perspectives as disabled activists and academics, alongside the voices of our disabled community, we hope to assist disability theology in recapturing its liberative roots.

Find the article here: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/cjtmhd/article/view/46676

For an video version of the podcast click here: 

https://youtu.be/Q1Hc2snMX20

• Follow us on Facebook and/or Instagram
• Read the Journal

Transcript

Welcome to the Mad and Crip Theology podcast! We're delighted to be back and I'm especially happy to be back with Emma CushmanWood Ceruti who's the new co-editor of the journal and co-host of the podcast.  She's also one of the authors of today's article. So I will turn it over to Emma to introduce herself and then we'll turn to the other three brilliant authors of this piece. 

Nice. Thank you. I'm really excited to be a co-editor and co-host with you, Miriam. It's really exciting. I've listened to the podcast for a while and read quite a few of the articles. So, this is a really great opportunity. I just finished my PhD from Emanuel College at the University of Toronto. I'll be graduating in only a couple weeks, so get to walk across the stage and get the hood and everything and I also teach a few courses at the Kimel Family Centre at Baycrest Health Services. I teach on spirituality and disability in the Christian and Jewish traditions. And I'm working on turning my dissertation into a book right now. So, that's exciting! Yay! 

And we'll have another podcast on your work because your dissertation is so important to hear about too. And just Emma, can you give a image description? 

Oh, yes! Yep. I'm sitting, but when I stand, I'm a short, white woman with kind of pink-reddish glasses, shoulder length brown, very much whiting, a lot of white in my hair and I have a brown blouse. Thanks. 

Cathy, can you tell us a bit about yourself? Sure. So, I'll start with my image description. So I am a white woman with non-apparent disabilities. I'm currently seated in my office with my background blurred, but you can tell there's some art on the walls. I'm wearing a like teal-coloured top and I have my hair back today because it's been a long day. So, I am an Assistant Professor at Augustana College and I primarily work in the Communication, Sciences and Disorders Department, which makes you wonder why I'm here, but I have a doctorate in disability studies and my focus has been on community inclusion for disabled people, particularly within religious settings. I'm actually actively, like I just came from, teaching a class on disability and religion, and I am very much enjoying being able to have those conversations with our undergraduate students at our liberal arts college. I also use she/her pronouns and I am very very happy to be chatting with you all. This group also hasn't been together for a while so it's nice to see everybody as well. Thanks, Cathy. 

How about you, Greg? Hi, I am Greg Woods. I am a Quaker minister/theologian and workshop facilitator, who lives in South Minneapolis.
I use he/him pronouns. My image description is that I am a white cis male with a really long red beard that is slowly turning grey, wearing a green flannel shirt and my background is that I'm sitting in my office right 

Now, Michelle. Yes. Hi, everybody. My name is Michelle. I use they/them pronouns. I am a white non-binary person sitting in my car because I had a plumbing emergency. So, life happens and we know that with disability life happens. So, that is where I'm currently sitting I am wearing a grey shirt and some terracotta glasses. A little bit about me is that I am the program manager of the disability resource hub at UCSD university. So yeah, this is a me, so I'm doing a lot of disability justice work in higher ed. Awesome. And so delighted to have you. 

I realized I didn't do a image description. So, for those who are new to the podcast. I'm fairly short, white cis women with short blonde hair that's becoming white as the days go by and purple-kind-of glasses and a black shirt. Behind me is a painting that I enjoy of trees and maybe some childhood things that I hope don't show up in the blurred background. So that's me. 

Oh, you wrote an article together. So, I wanted to just start off for those who haven't read it yet for you to tell us about the piece, where it came from, and what you discovered on the way and anyone can jump in and then others can jump into.

Don't all jump in at once.

I mean, I can talk a little bit about that, I guess. We all know each other through the Institute on Theology and Disability and had been... many of us having conversations outside of the Institute and a group of us were talking, I don't even remember about what, and we started talking about the fact that there wasn't a definition of disability theology that we were aware of that really resonated with us as disabled people and that like why was that and why isn't there and so that kind of was the impetus for Michelle and Greg and I to lead a session out of Summer Institute where we asked disabled people to talk about this. And we used the information we collected from that session to help us develop a definition about disability. And so, Emma was actually a part of that workshop as a participant, and then as we were talking about writing it up, we snagged Emma and made her join us. 

Yes, we were actually talking... we were going to read a book together and we were talking about the book. We never actually finished reading the book. Not to say anything bad about the book, but I think that we started talking and the workshop came out of that. So, we gave the workshop in 2023. So, we started talking about that in January and that we just wanted to do the workshop and I think only after doing the workshop and the feedback we got at the workshop did we think about writing the actual article and putting forth the definition. 

Yeah, I remember as a participant being very excited by the way the workshop was structured. It centred disabled people by... you explicitly said "if you're disabled, please contribute. If you're more of an ally, just hold back, watch and enjoy the show." And I'd never seen that done before, whether it's at ITD or other conferences or even in literature. And then I remember at the end Rosemarie Garland-Thomson was really excited about it and she had suggested that you all should write and I was like, please can I join? Because I was really excited by how you actually did the the workshop and I really wanted that to capture that moment. 

Yeah. And to add on to that too, I remember leading it and feeling simultaneously like, wow, this feels a like a big moment where we're actually able to center disabled voices in theology in a way that I hadn't experienced as a disabled person. And I think part of our conversations before this was like this is such an interesting field and discipline that we're in because there's so much interdependence with able-bodied people and disabled people and you don't necessarily have this dynamic in other fields where there is like shared authorship in this way. So, for you know feminist studies you don't have a dominance of like other genders writing for women, right? And so, I think just holding this nuance to say there's interdependence between abled and disabled and it's always going to be part of our field. But how do we share it in a way that feels more equitable towards disabled people? And so, it's kind of like the disabilities movement's mantra of "Nothing About Us Without Us," right? So, it's like how do we do it in a way that feels more equitable so disabled people aren't getting spoken for? And so, I think this for me, like what Emma's describing of like I want to be a part of this, it felt so empowering even being the ones leading this workshop of. This should have happened a long time ago and I'm so glad to be a part of it now. 

I'll just add really quickly too that one of the things that I think was especially unique about the workshop was that it was hybrid too. I wasn't able to join in person. So I was facilitating our online group and Greg and Michelle were in person and they were facilitating in person and so we had built amongst us some intentional access practices specifically knowing we were going to be using multiple formats at once. And I don't know that I've been in a workshop where the people online and the people in person were connected like that before either. And I think too like just coming from you know like a background where I'm thinking about how disabled people in particular we oftentimes can't go to conferences, like not only do wheelchairs get broken on airplanes regularly but also like they're cost prohibitive and there are other reasons why people can't go and virtual options are so much more accessible, even if still some people can't access that. But I think having it in a format where we invited people in multiple formats was also something that was kind of different and unique about how we had intentionally set up our time together. 

That's excellent. I wondered if before we move on if you could talk us through a bit about the workshop. We don't need every detail, but who was there and like how did you create that space? 

Well, we presented at the Institute of Theology and Disability is an annual conference that takes place every year and it has moved around the country. So that year, it was at Baylor School of Theology in Waco, Texas and it was fully hybrid. Cathy, Michelle and I have been on the planning committee at different times for the conference. So, we put together a simple slide deck where we talked about... we gave two or three examples of other definitions of... three definitions of disability theology from two from non-disabled people and one from a disabled theologian and then we designed a interactive feature using an online survey tool. Cathy, Michelle, do you want to add anything from a presenter of the workshop point of view?

Sure. We did also explicitly talk about the liberatory roots of disability theology and how Nancy Eiesland had kind of come from that tradition of liberatory theology when she wrote her work and how we felt like some of that early work especially by the disabled women who weren't theologians who were doing the work really focused on that liberation and that had kind of fallen off in our definitions. So, we did kind of prime the pump a little bit I guess you could say in terms of talking about liberation and how that wasn't necessarily present in the definitions that we reviewed. And then, we had several different questions or iterations that we ran the participants through to start with thinking about single words or phrases, which we created a word cloud out of and then made accessible to everybody in that space. It's also in the article if you want to see our word cloud, and then from those thoughts that we had shared with one another, we asked people to say like, "What are the defining parts of a disability theology from your perspective as disabled persons?" And so, we had them kind of do a fill-in- the blank, and some of them wrote a single word and some people wrote full sentences. It didn't matter what format people used, but they were able to kind of explain the elements of disability theology that they thought were the most important things to be included. And so we kind of ran through that together as a group during the workshop and talked about it as a team, but then that data for the article was analyzed differently to help us do it in a a bit more systematic way versus like live during a workshop. Michelle, did you have anything to add or Emma? 

I mean, I guess we could talk a bit about the way the the analysis developed later in the article, but I want to see if Michelle had anything else to say about the workshop. 

Yeah, thank you. One thing I was going to add... Cathy not to put you on the spot, but you did a really good job of explaining like what "allyship" means and you kind of put it in this analogy and I'm not going to do it perfectly. So, I think if you want to explain that. I thought that was a really beautiful way of like... Emma named it earlier saying like "sit back and enjoy the show," but I thought the way that you invited non-disabled folks to participate and not participate was really well done. So, if you want to speak on that, I thought that was good. 

Yeah, sure. One of the things that I teach in my disability studies classes is this idea of moving beyond allies to being accompllices. And this is something that I really have drawn inspiration from how the black community has talked about people supporting them in the things that they do. There's a video I show in one of my classes that kind of inspired me to say like, "hey, if if you don't identify as disabled, you are certainly welcome in this space, but we would ask that you don't answer the questions we're asking to disabled people," and instead we had an alternative prompt for them to think about, right? Or we encourage them if they were sitting by somebody who had access needs, say somebody who wasn't able to type into the system that we were using or needed access in another way that they could participate by assisting that disabled person in doing the work. Being an accomplice is about taking a step back from yourself and listening to the people who are most marginalized and what they want and need and then waiting for their direction before you take action. We  set up the workshop in a way that we asked the people in the room who identified as non-disableds to take that step of being good accomplices and supporting people or thinking through things on their own versus contributing to the definition we were... or the work we were striving to do as a disabled community. 

Right. That makes sense. I know Erin Raffety also uses that word and there's a autistic woman who uses that term but their name has slipped my mind right now but that's awesome. After the workshop, you studied the data and had some help analyzing the data. But I wondered, how was it when it came to writing as a community? Had you done that before? And yeah, how did that feel for you?

I mean, I love it. I'm doing more work in research as a community with other people for a different project that I'm working on now because something that I found as an early career faculty member is we are expected to do research and I hate doing it by myself. I just really don't enjoy it. I think working as a team allows you to lean into different people's strengths and weaknesses and I think that we as a team did that really really well. Greg and Michelle had a lot more um context around liberation theology than I did for sure and I think probably Emma too, but we leaned on Greg and Michelle for that like part of the conversation. At the time, I was the only one with a PhD, so like thinking about data analysis, it made more sense for me to kind of take the lead on that. I was able to bring in one of the students that I've been working with who also identifies as disabled to be a third party for our data analysis. That's the author who's missing from our current conversation. They're very busy working on a Masters of Social Work at the moment, so I wasn't going to bother them. Then, we were really able to kind of be like, "Hey, Emma's really good at this part, so Emma can write this part." And we divided and conquered really well and then also, we were able to come in and not make it sound like five people wrote this, which I think is also an accomplishment. Anyone else want to talk about working together?

Yeah, I love group projects, but I think like it because I like the accountability factor. I need that, especially as I am getting more in touch with how I am neurodiverse. It is hard for me to keep on track, how do I keep myself accountable. I like having accountability partners and I think also writing in a community, especially a disabled community, where we have different disabilities helps to inform how we experience crip theology helps to enhance our scholarship and our knowledge because there is no one experience of crip community and that was a great way to practice is lived theology.

Yeah, I really enjoyed especially the the way we worked. So, we had the Google doc and we were able to share resources together in that shared folder. Even just going through and we would comment on the way that we would choose certain verbs or certain adjectives and kind of going back and forth on what makes the most sense. I think often when I'm writing I have that internal dialogue of like, "oh, what is the best fit here to create a certain kind of tone?" But it was really great to be able to have that external dialogue and really think very intentionally about how we're framing what the key problem and gap is that we're trying to address in a way that's trying to be the most constructive and help the field really grow to include a wider wider range of voices. 

Totally. And I think one thing that's different than Greg, I do not like group projects, but I do like that there is a sense of safety and trust that I already have with these folks and that made it. And just to be able to be in crip spaces, even though we weren't all in the same room. I just feel like there's an extension of each other where we just all like get it. And so it felt like in a lot of ways easy because like of just like that crip understanding but also we do have prior friendships. And it felt like a really nice group project because there was that foundation we've already had. So I will add that piece. 

Yeah, I'm gonna definitely second that because writing itself is very messy and I hate sharing draft zeros to people and I really only share early writing to people I trust the most because then I can feel the most comfortable that I can share an unfinished unpolished thought. And that that was really freeing to just like write and and get the the conversation. 

That sounds amazing. 

And we haven't talked about the six member of the writing group. We need to give a shout out to Cathy's dog Stormy who was always present next to Cathy on her couch and was cheering us on only as a dog can do. 

Yes, Stormy is definitely an emotional support for people present and not present. He is a joy. 

Yeah, that's awesome. It makes me want to write with other people, which I get to do with Emma this spring for ITD so that's awesome.

Greg, I wondered if you could start us off on the next question, which I think it's really important when we think about doing interdisciplinary work. How does a disability justice framework help redefine disability theology? And for those who've never heard of the 10 principles of disability justice and all that, give a brief taste of what that contains. So Greg, can you start us off?

Yeah. I think going to ITD for the first time in 2022 really helped me to connect with disability community in a new way. But I found my way to disability theology to Nancy Eiesland's book The Disabled God during my last year at seminary back in 2014. And throughout the book, she points to liberation theologies part of Gutierrez's work, but then at that conference, I didn't hear a lot of that justice/liberation and I slowly started hearing through other speeches about Sins Invalid work and other disability justice movement. And I think it is really important when we talk about justice work that we highlight the work and the voices of the community we are seeking justice for, so disabled people in this context and I didn't see that at my first conference. That is the reason I joined the planning committee to reshape the confidence. At this upcoming conference, the speakers makeup looks totally different from 2022 in terms of disabilities, look different in terms of matters of faith. I think some of the push back I have with the disability theology field is that it has largely been about disabled people but not by disabled people and this is important and disability justice is so important about fighting for our rights and also remembering Alice Wong, Stacey Milbern, people who came before us in a justice framework, and Judy Heumann and the 504 sit-in in 1977. That is so important for theology to start incorporating that legacy and that hasn't happened a lot. I think we need to. As disabled theologians and writers in this field we need to hark back to the tradition because we have a lot to be thankful for to Nancy Eiesland as being the founder of the movement. But we also need to recognize the church as a lot of many of whom were and are women and non-binary people of colour.

Thanks, Greg. Yeah, Emma, do you want to jump in? 

Yeah, I was going to read the the disability justice principles, maybe if people are not familiar, they have at least a good starting point. So this came out of the work that Mia Mingus, Stacey Milbern, and Patty Berne had done together and they had come up with a list of 10 principles. So I'll read them now: [1] intersectionality, [2] leadership of the most impacted, [3] anti-capitalist politic, [4] cross-movement organizing, [5] recognizing wholeness, [6] sustainability, [7] cross disability solidarity, [8] interdependence, [9] collective access, and [10] collective liberation. I just want to also echo what Greg has said that in the field of display theology and, especially in conference spaces, you don't see justice being talked about very much or liberation, solidarity, all these [principles], and the recognition of all the work that has been done, as Greg has said, to ensure that disabled people can go to school and work and be just members of society. I think that the problem with not recognizing that history is that you're just furthering this divide between faith communities and the disability and crip community. I mean, when we're looking at the history in America with the movement towards trying to establish the Americans with Disabilities Act, a lot of churches opposed the ADA and that is still I feel like an open wound and it's still really.... There's a lot of reconciliation that needs to happen and even when churches start to move towards creating more accessible spaces I think a lot of work still has to be done around the idea of what the church is supposed to be and if the church is just to be an institution that provides charity, you know, that is why it's doing access needs... because that's the "good thing" to do because we're "good" people but not recognizing how disabled people, crip people have so much to offer and can be leaders in faith communities and in the field. I'm really hoping that this article helps recognize that more explicitly. And that doesn't mean that non-disabled people can't speak. It's more about trying to recognize, almost like an assessment of, who has spoken, who's still not being represented and that really aligns with the values of disability justice. 

Yeah, that's awesome. And I'm sure we could do a whole podcast on disability justice and theology. Maybe one day we will but I'm looking at the time and I need to move us along but it may come up in this next question. So in your paper, you identified themes of disabled justice, diverse community and the concept of crip divine. And I wondered if maybe one of you could talk about one each and another talk about another. So who wants to start us off?

Can I because I'm going to connect it to the last question? Yeah, so I think you know one of the things that disability justice resonates with our team a lot about is the fact that the disability justice movement was designed or created by people who were not well represented in the disability rights movement. You know disability rights was largely white, male and wheelchair users which didn't include a lot of other people. And within disability theology, we have seen leadership primarily amongst white men who identify as non-disabled who also hold doctorate degrees or at least the highest degree in their field which might be a Masters of Divinity. So the participants of the workshop also recognized this and were really pointing to the fact that there aren't a lot of disabled people contributing to this work. We're not participating. We're not co-writing. Disabled people historically have had less access to education, less ability to get doctoral degrees, which let me tell you that they are not made for people who are neurodivergent. You know it's really rough to kind of get through that system. And so the people who have been creating the knowledge that is most valued have not been the people most impacted. And so the theme of disabled justice really came out of this: "we're not being represented;" "we're not being heard;" "sometimes we have a seat at a table but it doesn't feel like anyone is listening to us." While we do value the work done by non-disabled people, what we want to do is challenge them to see if they could do that work in collaboration with disabled people who don't have the same level of power as they do within the academy. How do we get the voices of those that are usually silenced or not considered to be actually included in the work that we're doing? That idea of disabled justice is really kind of bringing together those ideas of centering the most impacted, having us be able to contribute equally to the work that's being done that impacts us. 

Right. Awesome. Cathy, thanks. Who wants to share a bit about diverse community?

I'm looking at Michelle because you haven't spoken in a while. You can go for it. No, no, you take it. I'm popcorning to Michelle.

Well, when I think about diverse community I think about how like when a large majority of the population at least in the US think about disability they're thinking about you know physical disabilities. They're thinking about the handicap symbol that's dominant in the West, which is like the person in the wheelchair with the blue handicap symbol. Within disability history, you read a lot about how like deaf communities are really pitted against other disabled community members because disability looks different for deaf community members. And so there's a whole history there. When thinking about how do we talk about this? How do we make sure that everybody is included, including with the disability studies discipline it being predominantly white and recognizing as all of the authors here today we are all white. And so, how do we handle like this question of privilege? And how do we handle this question of like there's a lot of communities within the disability community that are often pitted against each other. And I think sometimes throughout history, that's intentional to keep disabled people isolated. I think even in the act of us writing this together where we all have very different disabilities that is also an act of solidarity. So one of the questions Miriam asked us is about solidarity. So I think this is all a very intentional act of resistance against that monolith of disability and against being told that we are isolated from the rest of society. Right. So yeah, I think those are a few of my thoughts when it comes to that. 

Yeah, as you were talking the idea of resistance came to mind. So I'm glad we were...I was tuning into your brainwave...

Yes, Miriam was talking right into my ear. 

No, tuning into your brainwave. 

Yeah, totally. 

That's important. Yeah, thanks. And the the image concept of crip divine.

Yeah, that image of God being disabled and just like seeing and reimagining God reflecting the image of disabled people. By allowing and enabling disabled people to see themselves in the image of God is so powerful because for so long, and still today, we have... there is desire to talk about perfection, being especially in bodywise the perfect body and that is so embedded in our capitalist culture especially in the West. But how like even today there are still churches that openly discriminate against disabled people and especially churches and especially liberating denominations.So, I think it is just how do we... it's just powerful to imagine. I think as we see Jesus throughout the Bible talking about being in community and being together and just like the intimacy of community in the Bible we see and the love that Jesus and God have for marginalized people throughout the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible is so important to remember and to ground theology in. So that the crip divine is grounding us into the liberation that started with liberation theology from Latin America and Black Liberation theology started by James Cone coming out of the black power movement and the work of Howard Thurman. So, I think just realizing how not just God loves us but God is with us embodied in our struggle for liberation. 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I was the most excited by that last theme of crip divine for that very reason. And when we were looking through the participants' responses, which I was also a participant, but I remember seeing a lot of "image of God" and the word "crip" and I could see how that was so deeply intertwined. And I think really all those themes are so entwined together with disability justice and diverse community and crip divine. In the way that Nancy Eiesland describes Christ in a sip-puff wheelchair, that's not necessarily a device I use, that's not my disability, but I remember reading it the first time and being so incredibly moved because I thought, "oh, if Christ can be in this form, Christ can also be in other kind of forms." And it felt so expansive in a way that I'd come across in other disciplines again like Black Liberation theology but for this field, it was to be so connected to the body was really radical. 

Yeah, just briefly, sorry, Miriam, but just briefly I wanted to say that like the choice of crip divine as a term was also really intentional. Because while we as authors are all Christocentric in some way, shape or form or raised in a Christian tradition, we wanted to try to make it a definition that could cross faith traditions. By using "divine" instead of like a capital "G" God or something like that, we wanted to make it open to people from other faith traditions in a way that some of the previous definitions weren't necessarily clear on. 

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. 

That's helpful. Yeah, I see these teachings and ideas in our communities of faith can really dig into each of them in their own context and really have such rich conversations and see what actions will open up. I think you have started or added to really important work for communities of faith.

And finally, in the last few minutes, I want someone to share the definition you came up with and we probably don't. Yeah, let me start that again. Share the definition and for each of you briefly to share how it shapes your ongoing work or ministry or writing. Yeah, that would be great.

I can read it. Our definition from the article is: Disability Theology is a liberation theology that 1) is by and for disabled people, which centers lived experiences, validates our bodyminds, empowers our community to demand justice, especially economic and social justice, and continues to lift our communal work towards liberation; 2) leans into the sacred experience of diverse, interdependent community; 3) reflects the connection to the crip-divine and recognizes the inherent good of being created in their divine image.

And how such a beautiful definition I think. How does that continue to shape your work, Emma? 

Well, I was working on this article as I was writing my dissertation, especially as I was working on my chapter on method and it made me really think, I was already thinking intentionally about how to center disabled people, but it made me really think how do I create a method really that helps to shift the field towards centering disability theology making it by and for disabled people. And I think that is something I'm still carrying with me. And then I think the other two naturally follow from that to have a sacred experience of a diverse interdependent community only can come out of when you recognize the people in that community. 

Awesome. How about you Cathy? 

Yeah, I mean I think it impacts me in a lot of different areas. My current line of research is on neurodivergent college students and self- advocacy, which has absolutely nothing to do with faith in explicit ways. But also like as we're doing this work, myself and the team that I'm working on, one of the things we have been really intentional about is trying to figure out how do we create participatory opportunities where we can have people with that lived experience be a part of the conversations that we're having and speak into that in a way that doesn't like have weird power dynamics because we're the people who grade them in other contexts and you know those kinds of things. And I think you know having this experience where we were being intentionally centering and this definition that is talking about how we do things by and for and not about, you know, it really kind of informs how we've thought through a lot of the things that we're doing in this particular study. And then personally too like thinking about how do I make sure that I am having this community right or being interacting with people who have these same lived experiences so that I can experience the fullness of my faith and be able to lean into that in ways that I don't get from my non-disabled community, who are also valuable but don't contribute I guess to my well-being in the same way as my crip community does. So thinking about that and that reflection of the divine amongst us in a way that differs in the portraiture you see in a more combined group is definitely something that I think a lot more about since this definition. 

Thanks, Cathy. And Michelle?

Yeah, well in my work that I'm doing now in higher ed, building community for disabled students, faculty and staff. Something that I am quite surprised by at a secular university is how much students want to talk about God. And I thought, you know, I'd put my disability theology books back on the shelf and they came right back out the first week because people were asking about disability theology. So yeah, I come back to this definition thinking about the ways that the crip divine is either spoken or unspoken and how these dynamics of being able to really... as I'm working with disabled students... like they're becoming their own advocate for the first time and they're learning those tools and so really like getting to support students like finding their voice for the first time and so to be like getting to put it back on them saying like, "no, you are the expert of your own experience". I feel like that is what this definition gets back is like really getting to trust your own disabled experience and then if people want to call it divine they can. And then realizing that in itself is such a divine moment to watch to get to like steward people through even if that's not what they're calling it. So, I think this definition brings me back to how are people learning to advocate for and with themselves whether that's being individually feeling empowered but then also getting connected with community. And I think what this definition does is like Walter Rauschenbusch, who helped establish the social gospel in the 70s and 80s. He said if theology doesn't adapt to the current times then it will die. And so I think, that this definition is also keeping us accountable to the changes in society and in our bodies and our communities. I think this definition is always keeping me like on my toes and not in an exhausting way, but just to not be like relaxed, in a way to keep myself accountable for these things of always checking who's taking space and make space kind of thing. So yeah, I'm thinking about it more in terms of my students now, but I think it still speaks to the same thing about what Emma and Kathy were saying. Greg, is the sun eating you? I'm so sorry. 

Your face is divided in half like something. 

I can see that. Sorry, I am facing a window and the sun is low. I think for me, I think growing up in a faith tradition that really emphasize continuing revelation. I hope the definition is not the end, but the beginning of a new conversation and switching that conversation to really center disabled people, especially people who have been, who are more marginalized in this theology and community. As Michelle said, we are all white. We are all have advanced graduate degrees. Michelle and I have master's and Emma and Cathy have PhDs. There is a lot of privilege in that. We do acknowledge it, but I think making space for that. I think for me I want to continue writing in different communities furthering this work through research and encourage this and create opportunities for disabled people voices to be heard more and more in church, in theology, in different congregations. Also continue to be in community with people with different types of disability. I think something we didn't talk about in this podcast when we were talking about crip divine is that using the word crip is intentional because we are reclaiming, we are redeeming a profanity. How do we continue to redeem a marginalized community we belong to? And I think that is at the heart of my ministry and my work as a theologian and minister and facilitator. How do we redeem? And also how to lead crip theology? How does that intersect with other liberation theologies to help us know God in different ways that allows us to see God? What lenses reveals the divine and the power of divine revelation here on earth? 

Amen. And this has been such a such a wonderful conversation that can and should continue in other communities and so on. I thank you for your important work and that you published it in the journal and came here today. Thank you so much for sharing bits and pieces of crip wisdom, which is so important on the Mad and Crip Theology podcast. A quick word that the call for papers is out now. We will put information in the podcast description in the YouTube write up, so check that out. And we're looking forward to meeting you on another podcast in the future. So, thank you all again!

Thank you for having us! Thank you all! Yeah, this was great! Yeah, it was a great conversation!