Reframing Disability: Agency, Possibility, and Radical Dependency / Calli Micale

For the Life of the World / Yale Center for Faith & Culture

Show Notes

• Instructive irony: Evan’s disabling experience of setting up a microphone for a podcast interview
• Three ways to think about disability: Minority Model (Impairment of Individuals), Social Model (Societal factors create impairment), and Political Model (emerges from collective action and identity; generated from Americans with Disabilities Act)
• Chronic pain, real suffering
• All three models are important
• “Look at the arrangement of society—the conditions of possibility that empower our lives or that create obstacles to our flourishing.”
• How to Speak About Disability 101
• Care, solidarity, advocacy, and inclusion
• Understanding the ethics of disability through stories: narratives of the body, biblical narratives of healing, and theological stories
• Augustine’s City of God and moral impurity and the wounds of martyrs as glorified and amplified in resurrected bodies
• The hurt of “fixing” those with disabilities
• Doubting Thomas and exploring the resurrection wounds of Christ
• Story: Physical disability and amputation
• “It always starts with thinking about the loss”
• Hope and possibility through the loss
• Religion and spirituality as a tool to both help and also a self-critique of the “wholeness” or “normal” narrative.
• Critiquing the brokenness-wholeness narrative of disability
• “Drawing attention to the site of divine activity.”
• Is disability connected to sin?
• John 9:1-41: Jesus Heals the Man Born Blind
• Slowness, constancy, unwavering faith
• Story: Intellectual disability and autism
• Oxana’s Cymbalstern
• Cymbalstern (or Zimbelstern) is a star-shaped organ stop that makes a clanging, ringing sound during organ playing.
• Xenophobia, fear of difference, and stigma
• Calli reacts to the truism: “There are only two kinds of people: those who are disabled and those who will be disabled.”
• Visible and invisible disabilities: depression, anxiety, and mental health
• Are disabled lives worth living?
• Story: A surgeon develops multiple sclerosis
• Radical dependence on others
• Power, agency, and interdependency on others
• Start with the bare conditions of possibility, and then how those conditions of possibility change when disability emerges?

About

Calli Micale is Director of the MDiv Program; Assistant Professor of Theology and Ethics at Palmer Theological Seminary. She is a theologian with a particular interest in the ethical implications of theological talk for the whole of human life. Her research brings together the history of Christian thought with sustained attention to rhetoric as it grounds perceptions of the body and health in Western societies. She joined the Palmer Theological Seminary faculty in 2023 after earning a PhD from Yale University.

Writing and teaching correspond in Dr. Micale’s work to form students as faith leaders oriented towards gender, disability, and racial justice. She has published articles with the Journal of Disability and Religion and the Disability Studies Quarterly (forthcoming). Micale is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Crip Conversion: Narratives of Disability and Grace. The book analyzes the stories theologians tell about intellectual disability and argues that deploying intellectual disability as narrative metaphor allows one to come at the Protestant tradition from a helpful vantage point—such that the significance of sensation for the reception of grace comes to the fore.

As a candidate for ordination in the ELCA with 10+ years of preaching experience, Dr. Micale delights in the variety of ways her students take up theological resources for ministry and social justice action. In each course, she aims to take students beyond learning concepts by letting divergent beliefs shape and change their perspective on what really matters—their own intellectual and spiritual lives called to make a difference in the world.

Production Notes

• This podcast featured Calli Micale
• Edited and Produced by Evan Rosa
• Hosted by Evan Rosa
• Production Assistance by Logan Ledman, Macie Bridge, and Kaylen Yun
• A Production of the Yale Center for Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity School https://faith.yale.edu/about
• Support For the Life of the World podcast by giving to the Yale Center for Faith & Culture: https://faith.yale.edu/give
• This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of the Tyndale House Foundation. For more information, visit tyndale.foundation.