Follow-up to WATERtalk with Darla Schumm
Healing Ableism: Stories About Disability and Religious Life
Wednesday December 10, 2025, 1 PM ET
WATER thanks Darla Schumm for sharing her book, Healing Ableism: Stories about Disability and Religious Life (Rutgers University Press, 2026). The issues are compelling, the presentation was engaging, and change will come of it.
The program began with a land acknowledgement. Following was a time of silence for the many immigrants who have come so bravely to this country, especially those from Somalia who were recently branded as “garbage” by the U.S. President. There are simply no words to undo such gratuitous cruelty, but our silence is our rejection of such scandal.
The video and these notes can be found at: https://youtu.be/akllF6YXgUw
Please feel free to share this material with others.
Mary E. Hunt’s Introduction to Darla Schumm:
Darla Schumm is Associate Provost at Hollins University in Virginia. According to her Hollins’ biography, Darla “received her B.A. in interdisciplinary studies with concentrations in history, psychology, and women’s studies from Goshen College, her M.A. in social ethics from the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA, and her Ph.D. in religion, ethics, and society from Vanderbilt University. Schumm’s current research focuses on intersections between religious studies and disability studies. She is the coeditor of Disability and World Religions: An Introduction, a textbook on world religions and disability. Her book, Healing Ableism, is a welcome contribution to the literature about religion and disability studies.
WATER has had many Mennonite connections over the years, starting with Pastor Cindy Lapp, and including several Mennonite Voluntary Service people as WATER interns. Diann and I met in Berkeley so I am always sure that the best of the best go there to study! I can see the Berkeley influence in your creativity and openness! I know less about Vanderbilt, but Emilie Townes made that a happening place when she was the Dean.
Darla and I met when she was the Chair of the Status Committee for People with Disabilities in the Profession for the American Academy of Religion and I did the same work with the Status of LGBTIQ+ Persons in the Professions Committee. I knew immediately that I was working with a person of solid academic preparation and excellent administrative skills, not a common combination in the religious academy.
Here is what we at WATER said about her book when we listed it with our What We’re Reading suggestions: “Most people encounter disability at some point in their lives, either in their own bodies or through a friend or loved one. Religious teachings and metaphors are often used to explain the presence of disability, but rarely do we hear the voices of people living with disabilities reflecting on their experiences of God, faith, or religious life. Darla Schumm explores the stories of people with disabilities who struggle with the human challenges of faith and doubt, exclusion and inclusion, injustice and justice. She invites readers to reflect on the experiences of people with disabilities in religious communities and organizations. She argues that it is not disability that needs healing. It is ableism that needs healing. “Accessible love” is her insightful suggestion for the way forward.
Further, in my comment on the book jacket, I wrote: “Careful, candid, comprehensive analysis grounded in interviews with disabled people opens new paths. This deftly written book is theology at its most useful.”
Darla, I am indebted to you for insights, and especially for your candor. You call things as you experience them, whether in the professional arena or with friends. I appreciate a theologian who has the guts to say that Communion is vexed and fraught both in its concept and design. I appreciate your good ideas for moving forward.
Very few people have lifted “badass” to a theological term of art as you have! I am happy to share you with a wider WATER group today. Thanks for the book and thanks for being here.
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Darla Schumm’s Remarks can be found on the video: https://youtu.be/akllF6YXgUw
Here are some highlights:
Darla began her remarks by recalling the first time she and Mary E. Hunt met in person in 2024 at the American Academy of Religion celebration of their shared friend and colleague Judith Plaskow who had been inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame. Darla described herself as blind and said that when she lectures she is performing disability.
Darla was diagnosed with a lifechanging disability at age 8. Diagnosis revealed that she had a rare disease that is something like juvenile macular degeneration. She has been legally blind since the initial diagnosis; though she sees some light, she is functionally blind.
A group from her parents’ Mennonite church, where her father was the minister, laid hands on her for healing. She now calls them the prayer warriors.
When the doctor finally landed on a diagnosis, he said, “There is nothing you cannot do other than drive a car.” The prayer warriors were sure she had been healed, they thought, by prayer. She has come to question and reject that approach.
Conversations with other people with disabilities about their experiences in religious communities and organizations revealed that religion and all that surrounds it surfaced as some of the most powerful examples of ableism.
Patricia Hill Collins in her landmark book Black Feminist Thought (1990) wrote of the controlling images for Black women like mammy, welfare mother, and others, negative representations and stereotypes that reinforce prejudice. Similarly, according to Daral Schumm, the controlling images of people with disabilities are sinner and saint.
People with disabilities are said to have sins that need forgiving. Jesus will heal. In other traditions, for example in Buddhism, disability is a matter of karma. Disability is seen as a moral lack in an individual impaired body.
The saint image is equally problematic. Being told “You are so amazing, you are so wonderful, you are a special person who teaches the rest of us…” is a way to ‘other’ people. Disabled people are seen as saintly exemplars.
Whether sinner or saint, there are four problematic parallels:
1. Disability is a matter of impairment of an individual body leaving aside social, religious, cultural, systemic elements that discriminate, exclude and minimize access and belonging
2. There is a stark us/them distinction, a way of othering
3. Disability is always understood and defined as a state of suffering; the saint is admired for heroic suffering
4. Disability is always met with pity
Healing is typically offered as the solution to these situations. It is not disability that needs to be healed, but the ableism that is so common. This is not to minimize one person’s desire for healing. But for many disabled people, healing is neither desired nor possible. Ableism is what religions need to heal.
Accessible love is one way of healing for healing ableism. It is action in motion, not stable or stagnant. Every member of a community has to be involved in setting up accessible love. All bodies are worthy and valued of being included, having access. Radical practices are needed to insure that everybody is granted inclusions, access, justice, and belonging.
In light of the problematic parallels, accessible love:
1. Calls all to resist individual notions of disability and build just communities
2. Erases the us-them distinction; all are involved in creating the conditions for accessible love
3. Disability is not state of suffering (or sainthood) but one of many forms of human variation
4. Accessible love dismisses all forms of pity
Accessible love is context driven. Accessible love is a call to action to religious community to do better to address all fundamental forms of discrimination.
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Discussion
1. The first questioner commented about having 2 kinds of disabilities—mobility issues for which she uses a walker and a learning disability which is unseen by many. The particularity of disabilities is important.
DS: Darla agreed and added that defining disability is hard because of the variety of disabilities. Darla’s survey group was made up of people who had physical disabilities (not including developmental, for example). Thus, accessible love has to be context driven.
2. The second speaker told of being diagnosed at age 14 that she would be in a wheelchair all of her life. In fact, with help and encouragement she did not use a chair until she was in her 50s. She underscored the importance of people who give encouragement like Darla’s doctor and some of the speaker’s family.
DS: Darla spoke of talking with her parents recently about her book and their response to the doctor who was so encouraging. The doctor helped her parents to parent her in a positive way.
3. A comment from an Irish colleague reported the common practice in her mother’s generation of keeping disabled people hidden. Language about “the cross to bear” was common. Now that people have prenatal information and can choose to birth or not a baby with a disability, there is a problem with expecting to live in a perfect world.
DS: Social engineering and eugenics are major topics in this regard. She proclaimed terror in the face of those movements and their consequences.
The theological issue of being created in the image of God was the subject of Nancy Eiesland’s ground-breaking book The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability (1994). Christian disability liberation theology includes images of the post crucifixion Jesus with marks of crucifixion. This was proposed as a powerful image of God such that disabled people could be seen as created in the image of God. Other writer, Rabbi Lauren Tuchman, first female blind American rabbi, commented that nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is there a limit on whom among humans that includes. “Radical inclusion” is Tuchman’s phrase to include all.
4. Another colleague inquired as to whether Darla Schumm used Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s term “kyriarchy” or Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term “intersectionality” in her analysis.
DS: She does not use Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s term though she admires Elisabeth’s work. She does use Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality. Addressing disability/ableism involves addressing racism, sexism. Creating just communities across the board is the goal.
The Moderator spoke of some of the most exciting work in theology being done with a disability focus. She called Darla’s Healing Ableism and Rabbi Julia Watts Belser’s Loving Our Own Bones as bookends for a shelfful of important books on disability theology.
5. In a recent WATERtalk, the Rev. Dr. Teresa Smallwood talked about violent rhetoric in the pulpit and how it is used against LGBTQIA+ people https://www.waterwomensalliance.org/watertalks/. The questioner said that perhaps the healing narratives, however well intentioned, have the same impact, and might well fit her description of violent rhetoric. Are there texts that simply ought to be left aside?
DS: Darla thinks that the healing narratives are not helpful. Jesus seems to have healed every disabled person he met. One critic wrote that maybe people with disabilities might have been better off for 2000 years if someone had told Jesus to go out into the world and heal ableism instead.
Healing narratives can result in an erasure of people. Healing stories contributed to her sense of disability as a problem: what did I do wrong?
Still, it is also important to lift up contradictory voices and include voices of those with whom one does not agree , for example, those who favor the healing narratives. Darla mentioned a blind Methodist minister who said he preaches those texts as examples of restoring community, not physical healing but social healing from isolation. Darla is not sure what to do with the texts, but they are a problem.
6. A participant commented on the texts as to whether the healing is for the disabled person or for others. She told the story of a blind person who was able to touch what she could not see at Lourdes. The blind person said she was not looking to see again but to have access, in justice, to what she cannot see.
7. The final questioner asked DC to write more about the healing narratives just as Teresa Smallwood calls out particular offenders and the damage they do in the pulpit to queer kids.
DS: Darla mentioned the work that she and Jennifer Koosed did critiquing ableism and antisemitism. Koosed, J. & Schumm, D., (2005) “Out of the Darkness: Examining the Rhetoric of Blindness in the Gospel of John”, Disability Studies Quarterly 25(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v25i1.528
8. The Moderator lifted up one more excellent part of this volume which deals with the fraught nature of Communion but as an idea and as a practice. The gory blood/wine image is problematic, and so too is the physical act of receiving the elements. Darla’s reflections on this in her book show the close link between ideas and practices.
DS: Darla reported that she often uses the Communion section of the book for working with Christian communities. It illuminates how a focus on disability raises important theoretical/theological issues as well as practical consideration like how to get to the elements, how to handle them, and the like.
WATER thanks Darla Schumm for this powerful presentation. We look forward to continued conversation with her.
Here is a link to purchase the book from the publisher: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/healing-ableism/9781978842205
