¹ See the report of the Alzheimer's Society, Dementia UK, available at http://www.alzheimers.org.uk/site/scripts/download_info.php?downloadID=1 (accessed March 2009).

² Thomas J. Grabowski and Antonio R. Damasio, ‘Definition, clinical features and neuroanatomical basis of dementia’ in Margaret M. Esiri, Virginia M. -Y. Lee and John Q. Trojanowski (Eds) The Neuropathology of Dementia, Second Edition (Cambridge: University Press 2004) p 2, available online at http://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/19152/excerpt/9780521819152_excerpt.pdf

³ “Hence, it becomes possible to say that Alzheimer's disease represents deconstruction incarnate. The instability of meaning and free play of signifiers which deconstructionists enjoy talking about become manifest most clearly in an Alzheimer's patient. Particularly in the latter stages, the slipperiness of a patient's language becomes apparent.” Keck, David, Forgetting Whose We Are: Alzheimer's disease and the Love of God (Nashville: Abingdon Press 1996) p. 32Google Scholar.

⁴ See especially Kitwood, Tom, Dementia Reconsidered: the person comes first (Buckingham: Open University Press 1997)Google Scholar.

⁵ Stephen G Post, “Respectare: moral respect for the lives of the deeply forgetful” pp. 223–234, in Hughes, Julian C., Louw, Stephen J., Sabat, Steven R. (Eds), Dementia: mind, meaning and the person (Oxford: University Press 2006)Google Scholar. Quote from p. 233.

⁶ Goldsmith, Malcolm, ‘Dementia: A Challenge to Christian Theology and Pastoral Care’ in Jewell, Albert (Ed), Spirituality and Ageing (London: Jessica Kingsley 1999) p. 127Google Scholar.

⁷ In Jewell, Albert (Ed), Spirituality and Ageing (London: Jessica Kingsley 1999) pp. 125–35Google Scholar.

⁸ Ibid, pp. 129–131.

⁹ McKim, Donald (Ed), God Never Forgets: Faith, Hope and Alzheimer's Disease (Louisville, Westminster John Knox, 1997)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ So e.g. Keck, op.cit. p. 93: “An important criterion form many theologies is social justice. Unfortunately, … this disease is an equal opportunity destroyer … Ultimately, death and disease scandalously overcome us all.”

¹¹ Hauerwas, Stanley, Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986) p. 178Google Scholar. The reference to ‘the retarded’ is colloquial in the US context for those who in the UK would be referred to as ‘mentally handicapped’.

¹² Ibid, p. 31.

¹³ See p. 85 of Rosalie Hudson, ‘Disabled or Enabled: Ethical and Theological Issues for Dementia Care pp. 81–93 in MacKinlay, Elizabeth (ed), Ageing, Disability and Spirituality: Addressing the Challenge of Disability in Later Life (London: Jessica Kingsley 2008)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ In her important paper, Kilby, Karen, ‘Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the. Trinity ’, New Blackfriars 81 (2000), pp. 432–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ See e.g Eiesland's comments in relation to disability: “Here is the resurrected Christ making good on the incarnational proclamation that God would be with us, embodied as we are, incorporating the fullness of human contingency and ordinary life into God. In presenting his impaired hands and feet to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God. Jesus, the resurrected Savior, calls for his frightened companions to recognize in the marks of impairment their own connection with God, their own salvation. In so doing, this disabled God is also the revealer of a new humanity.”Eiesland, Nancy, The disabled God : toward a liberatory theology of disability (Nashville: Abingdon 1994) p. 100Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Gregory of Nazianzus, reply to Apollinaris, Ep. 101, 32.

¹⁷ From Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica III, 46, 6: “the magnitude of Christ's suffering can be estimated from the singleness of His pain and sadness. In other sufferers the interior sadness is mitigated, and even the exterior suffering, from some consideration of reason, by some derivation or redundance from the higher powers into the lower; but it was not so with the suffering Christ, because “He permitted each one of His powers to exercise its proper function,” as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. Iii).” (English Dominican Province, second edition 1920).

¹⁸ A. Harry Lesser, ‘Dementia and Personal Identity’ in Hughes et al (eds) Dementia pp. 55–62. Quotation from p. 59.

¹⁹ “This is because it is part of our identity, like it or not, that we will surely die and probably decline … . that we are liable to decline is an essential fact of what we are – just as is the fact that we have developed in all sorts of ways since birth.” (Lesser, p. 59).

²⁰ Thus, we are treating dementia as a possibility integral to the process of human intellect, exposed in the aging process but also (to anticipate) for all of us in situations of extreme mental or physiological stress and disorientation. In terms of Aquinas’ discussion in III/14/1–4 and III/46/5, we are treating it not along the lines of epilepsy (defect of the original formative principle or, as we might say now, a genetic predisposition) but along the lines of fatigue or hunger – the consequence of contingent circumstances upon the victim. This then lines it up with e.g. the temporary dementia brought on by torture, sleeplessness, pain, dehydration on the cross.

²¹ Moltmann, Jurgen, The Crucified God (London: SCM 1974) pp. 58–9Google Scholar.

²² “For identity by definition is not momentary: questions of identity are not about whether a thing is at any moment identical with itself, which it obviously is, but whether it is identical with something earlier.” (Lesser, p. 59).

²³ Michael Schmaus, ‘Mariology’ in Karl Rahner (Ed) Encyclopedia of Theology: the concise sacramentum mundi (London: Continuum 1975), pp. 893–901, p. 900. Speaking of the title ‘coredemptrix’ when applied to Mary, Schmaus argues that “If … the mediatorship of Mary is affirmed, this is in order to bring out a fundamental thought from the Bible, the solidarity of all men (sic). Men do not receive salvation as individuals or monads in isolation from each other, but as social beings. Each one who receives the gift of salvation becomes himself a source of salvation. The good of one is fertile in good things for the other.” In this sense, all can be considered ‘co-redeemers’; and although this status is clearly subordinate to Christ's, it is equally clearly connected to it.

²⁴ This idea of the self as narrative is developed by Ricoeur (1992) and Taylor (1989). See the discussion in Jennifer Radden and Joan M Fordyce, ‘Into the darkness: losibg identity with dementia’ in Hughes, Dementia pp. 71–88, especially p. 74: “These identities are constituted, it is widely agreed, by a complex interaction between first-, second- and third-person perspectives … The very self-awareness required to possess an identity depends upon and grows out of the contribution, and particularly the recognition of other persons, as well as deriving from otherness as such … ”

²⁵ See Jennifer Radden and Joan M Fordyce, ‘Into the darkness: losing identity with dementia’ in Hughes, Dementia pp. 71–88. Phrase from p. 73.

²⁶ See Moltmann, ElisabethWendel here on the community of Jesus in ‘Is there a Feminist Theology of the Cross?’ in Tesfai, Y (Ed), The Scandal of a Crucified World (New York: Orbis 1994) pp. 87–98Google Scholar.