Disability Advocacy + Healthcare

The reality that is so clear for people with disabilities — that human flourishing is reliant on a network of interdependent relationships — is a trend that can be seen throughout healthcare practices as a whole. Everything that I’ve been describing illustrates that healthcare is not just what happens in a doctor’s office: it is about the relationships and supports necessary for a life of human flourishing.

I grant it as a positive sign for our cultural moral conscience when a video of a turtle can spur on practical, widespread action. Yet, it is a mark against our conscience when that progress seemingly comes at the expense of people who are already marginalized.

But the hard truth we like to avoid, the truth that Zika is calling us to face yet again, is that our bodies are vulnerable, contingent. Control is an illusion; chance is always at play. Control is not a virtue. Prudence, by contrast, offers a necessary tool in navigating the line between caution and paranoia, between isolating ourselves out of fear and willful disregard of health.

The citizens of Baltimore that paraded and continued the protest with music and dance on Tuesday morning were loving with their bodies, trying to find lightness in dark, seeking resurrection when surrounded by death.

What does it takes to “right the wrongs” that have been done? In other words, what is the role of an apology in the movement towards justice?

To reduce the impact of what happened to her to what occurred during a missing few hours of her memory is to undermine her credibility to speak to her total experience, to all that has happened to her since waking up in a gurney, missing her underwear.

Culture and Commentary

In the theater as I watched this revelation unfold, I had a sense of the narrative being upended…The truth is found when history is viewed from below, not from above: and so Danvers learns the truth of her own history as a part of taking the side of the Skrulls, the side of the poor.

I have often thought of Mary in her grief on Holy Saturday. I imagine her restlessness. Grief feels like endless waiting, waiting for nothing and everything all at once.

Stewart wrote narratives that targeted loci of power, that cast political leaders as buffoons, and our news outlets as incompetent at best, at worst viciously deceitful. He was not trying to write truth in a journalistic sense, though he often stumbled upon it. Stewart’s primary goal was exposing lies fed to us by the powers and principalities. So when Stewart turned his satire on the Catholic Church, this was not a bad thing, though it often stung.