I just received this press release where I work. To me, "Joni and Friends" sound like a bunch of vultures. I've highlighted the most ghoulish passages. Curious how others react to this:
Joni and Friends Develops Course on ‘A Theology of Suffering and Disability’ for Seminaries and Christian Universities:
New Partners to Start Courses this Fall
AGOURA HILLS, Calif., June 8, 2010 – Joni and Friends International Disability Center, an organization whose purpose is to accelerate ministry to the disability community, through its Christian Institute on Disability (CID), has developed a university level course on “A Theology of Suffering and Disability,” which has been adopted by several universities around the country, with more to sign on this Fall.
The first to offer this course was the Biblical Studies Department at Biola University in La Mirada, Calif. Dr. Kathy McReynolds, Ph.D., Public Policy Director for the Joni and Friends Christian Institute on Disability and adjunct professor at Biola University, began teaching the course in the Spring of 2007. Dallas Theological Seminary and Masters College now also offer the course.
Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., is the most recent university to add the course to its list of program studies. Taught as a one-week Summer intensive, “A Theology of Suffering and Disability” will be offered during the week of August 2-6, 2010. McReynolds will be the professor for this course.
The course is designed to help students answer some of life’s most unanswerable questions: How could a good and loving God allow such evil and suffering: war, poverty, famine, disability? People with disabilities suffer from the evils of the world more than many other people groups. How could God allow this to happen?
In addition, students will be prepared to conduct ministry to what is considered one of the largest underrepresented groups, with more than 650 million people worldwide living with a disability (roughly 10 percent of the world's population).
“While it is also one of the largest unchurched groups on earth, people affected by disabilities have much to teach us about spiritual transformation,” McReynolds said. “Their specific plight – their sufferings both personally and publically – mirror the human condition and Christian journey in many unique ways.”
Joni and Friends established the CID in 2007, realizing the Christian community needed a resource regarding life issues in a day and age when the lives of the most vulnerable are under threat. Joni and Friends is passionately concerned about the many issues currently being debated in the medical arena, such as health care reform, stem cell research, reproductive technologies, and end of life care. The CID exists to educate the church on these important ethical concerns.
For more than 30 years, Joni and Friends has worked to accelerate ministry to the disability community, offering a wide array of life-affirming ministries to people with disabilities around the world. Joni and Friends does this through the International Disability Center; the CID; international radio and television programs filled with inspirational stories; Wheels for the World, which every year sees thousands of individuals receive wheelchairs and the life-giving message of the Gospel; and Family Retreats held in the U.S. and around the world, where families affected by disability learn that they are not alone. More information can be found online at the ministry’s new website, www.joniandfriends.org.
I had a debate with my wife recently about the baffling instance (to me) of hyper-religious people with disabilities. We're both atheists for the record. I work with people with disabilities, and to me the sort of language in this press release is well-meaning in some instances, but at root disgustingly condescending. I doubt many people with disabilities relish the idea of being living lessons in humility for people who have to learn about suffering in non-accredited college courses. I doubt even the most religious people with disabilities like that idea, sympathetic though many might be to their hidden political agenda (and believe me, when these people express an interest in stem cell research, it's not because they hope for cures; they like their cripples to stay crippled, or else all that beautiful imitation of Christhood goes down the toilet).
In any case, my wife said people with disabilities should be given a pass on getting whatever comfort they need however they can get it. She argued that it's cruel, perhaps, to insist on clear-eyed rationality from someone who, without promise of reward in an afterlife, might be left in abject despair over the realization that their being singled out for special suffering is utterly devoid of reason or justice, but is, in coldblooded fact, a pure accident of the universe.
I will simply say that I disagreed with her. In my opinion, if something's evidence-based truth is good enough for one person, it's good enough for everybody, regardless of any special circumstances. In fact, I think it's utterly ridiculous to think of suffering as a price one (other than me, thank gods!) pays in this life for--for what, exactly? Pleasure? Health? Ease?--in the next life.
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