Disability and relationality: Disrupting complacency, entering into vulnerability

Contemporary Western societies have established processes to draw people living with disabilities into mainstream society. Specialist care services, government funding and legislated parameters for building codes, antidiscrimination have never been more secure across societies like Australia. At the same time, however, these same societies have entered into policies and priorities that seek to ensure a very limited number of disabled persons survive to birth and that they continue to be marginalised. A relational discourse founded on the recognition of mutual vulnerability and intersubjectivity can confront our societal inconsistencies and offers the possibility of a way forward. Christian theology and practice have experience of entering into brokenness to hold a mirror to human existence, not to eliminate that brokenness but to celebrate it. A practical theology of personhood may enable the Church and society to more positively celebrate the diversity of the human condition rather than pay it lip service.