Hauerwas

Hauerwas

1. interested in intellectual disabilities

2. they provide "a crack in modernity"

3. what kind of narrative will form us to be the types of people who no longer see disability as a problem to be solved?

4. re-narrate the existence of people with disability, moving understandings of their presence from assumptions of tragedy to a revelation of who God is and how human beings who claim God as their saviour and friend should be

5. intellectual disability is a revelation of the true nature of humanness

6. His interest is not in solving moral dilemmas or working through quandaries relating to situations, events and contexts. Rather his intention is to get the reader to question why it is they think that particular issue and situations should be framed as “problems” in the first place.

7. they are people to whom the modern category of ‘free, autonomous individual’ is not and could never be applied

   • modernity the lives of people with profound and complex intellectual disabilities become particularly problematic

8. modernity

   • Post-Enlightenment Western culture is liberal in its worldview, assumptions and expectations. Liberalism is a political philosophy that emphasises such things as the importance of autonomy, individualism, reason, rationality, independence and the capacity for self-advocacy.
     • the assumed norm for authentic human living is that a person should be able to articulate their ideas cognitively, logically and rationally.
     • Modernity is characterised by the growth and strengthening of a specific set of social practices and ways of doing things that is deeply tied in with the philosophical assumptions of liberalism.

9. We create our own stories quite independently of the stories of others. Liberalism is thus seen to be about individualism freedom, autonomy and choice, and helping others acquire the power to choose and to gain these particular social goods

10. Within a liberal worldview intellectual disability can only be viewed as a problem. People with these life experiences have and will never have the life experiences that liberal philosophies demand for authentic human living.

11. Morality became a realm quite separate from particular narratives or practices

12. Movement away from community and practice (within which personhood and humanness were deeply bound in with community and practice) towards individual choice, reflection and action wherein humanness was bound in with reason, intellect and individualism.

13. Hauerwas argues that the task of Christians is not to try and prove to the world that the gospel is reasonable, rational, sensible and universally applicable, i.e. to follow the criterion of modernity. The task of the church is to bear witness to a radically different story. The Christian story precisely because it relates to the particular, cannot be universalised and therefore cannot meet modernity’s criteria of rational belief.

14. Modernity informs us that we are independent, autonomous individuals and that through human effort we can progress to rapidly higher states of excellence. Scripture however, informs us that we are creatures, who are wholly dependant on God for all things. Dependency, not autonomy, is one of the ontological characteristics of our lives. That we are creatures, moreover is but a reminder that we are created with and for one another. We are not just accidentally communal, but we are such by necessity

15. Hauerwas draws our attention to the fact that the problem is not inherently within the experience of intellectual disability but within the assumptions of modernity. We do not write our own narratives; rather we participate in the ongoing narrative of the God who is revealed paradigmatically in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

16. For modernity then dependence is perceived to be highly problematic; for theology, dependency reflects the reality of the human condition.

    • People with profound intellectual disabilities witness clearly to that which the church is often tempted to forget
      • Hauerwas marks out the lives of people with profound intellectual disabilities as paradigmatic rather than exceptional; their needs are ordinary rather than special needs