“My skin cracks like scorched earth.”[1] Despite my familiarity with modern theologies that engage the example of Job, images like this one from poet Anne Kaier, drawing the reader’s gaze to her disabling skin condition, startled me by their similarities to the book of Job. Like Job, modern poets of disability, such as those collected in Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, write in vivid language of flesh, bones, and body and put pain into words in ways that are times wildly freeing and at times frighteningly out of control as they confront audiences that do not want to hear what they have to say.[2] Writing from an experience like Job’s, modern poets of disability suggest a fresh reading of Job centered on Job’s own experience. Reading their work, I realized that in my studies of Job, I had avoided any discussion of disability—my own or anyone else’s. Was my avoidance my own prejudice against disability, an assumption of an ableist worldview? Reading the modern poetry of disability in dialogue with the book of Job offered an opportunity to unseat such assumptions and to explore a constructive reading of Job from the perspective of disability.

Although the book of Job has been brought into conversation with many histories of suffering, including disability, nevertheless, drawing Job into conversation with modern poetry of disability offers new insight because it focuses attention on the poetry and the art of constructing experience into speech, the conflict between welcome and unwelcome speech, and the issues of access and privilege that lie behind such conflict. Emily Arndt writes that the most difficult stories of the Hebrew Bible do not resolve into one simple model of instruction but must be engaged in “an ongoing process—the work of a lifetime.”[3] She argues that the work of connecting modern and biblical texts—a work she calls a kind of “attunement”—begins as interpretation but grows into ethics as it reveals new ways of being in the world.[4] Job is certainly a difficult text that demands the work of a lifetime. Attuning Job with modern poetry of disability offers an opportunity to unseat some of the easy (or ableist) connections between Job and disability and to explore the diversity of our embodied connections with one another and with God.

The insights the poetry of disability brings to dialogue with Job’s story can help identify some implications for a constructive theology of disability. First, sharing the concerns of modern theological anthropology, disabled persons—like all human persons—have a creative, relational freedom through which to respond to “divine self-communication received in and through the finite realities of the world.”[5] This claim challenges the dominant social narratives that privilege those without disabilities by assuming silence or dependence from people with disabilities.[6] Communities use metaphors and models, narrative and rhetoric, to describe disability as “an unwanted way of being” according to a variety of moralized, medicalized, racialized, or gendered norms.[7] The poets use their own creative metaphors to expose and crack open the normative boundaries built by self-preservation and fear.

Read the full article “O That My Words Were Written Down!” Contested Bodies and Unwelcome Words in the Book of Job and Modern Poetry of Disability” published in Horizons Volume 49, Issue 2, with free access until 24th February.

[1] Anne Kaier, “River Creature,” in Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, ed. Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen (El Paso, TX: Cinco Puntos Press, 2011), 236.

[2] Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen, eds., Beauty Is a Verb.

[3] Emily Arndt, Demanding Our Attention: The Hebrew Bible as a Source for Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2011), 176.

[4] Arndt, Demanding Our Attention, 86–87, 189.

[5] Doak, Mary, “Sex, Race, and Culture: Constructing Theological Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century,” Theological Studies 80, no. 3 (September 2019): 510, https://doi.org/10.1177/0040563919856365.

[6] Nathan Esala, “Towards Contextualizing ‘Contextual Bible Study’ among the Bikɔɔm Peoples in Ghana,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 154 (March 2016): 114.

[7] Titchkosky, Tanya, “Life with Dead Metaphors,” Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 9, no. 1 (January 2015): 9, https://doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2015.1.