Rebecca Spurrier is a Ph.D. candidate in Theological Studies in Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion. Her research engages embodiment theories and disability studies as important resources for religious and ritual aesthetics. Her dissertation, titled “Works of Love: Beauty and Fragility in a Community of Difference,” focuses on a Christian church in which persons with psychiatric disabilities are central to the life of the congregation.

The Disabled Church: Desiring Difference within Congregational Life

Commitment & Belonging, Culture Frame, Disability, Interviews, Participant Observation, Theology Frame

How does a congregation make time and space for the disabilities and differences of those who constitute it? How does it claim those differences as vital to its forms of knowing and loving God rather than disruptive to its unity? Such questions animate my encounter with Holy Family Episcopal Church[1], a parish in which a…