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Research Network on the Bible and Culture: disability and healthcare

For much of Christian history disability and illness have been treated as symptoms of sin or signs of spiritual failure. The rise of Disability Studies in the 1980s and the subsequent increased attention to the discrimination faced by people with disabilities has revolutionised current thinking about disability and impairment.

This research sub-theme aims to re-examine the texts of the Hebrew Bible, Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament and early Christianity with these interests and commitments in mind.

Members of the group work with a variety of different methodologies and forms of evidence including ancient archaeology, medical anthropology, metaphor theory, sociology, and philology. Our approach is intersectional and considers the intersection of gender identity, race, aging, disability, and ethnicity in both antiquity and the present.

We are interested both in reconsidering how ancient authors and religious texts used the language of disability to ‘think with’ and in addressing inequalities in modern religious contexts. Our research has relevance to debates concerning infertility and fertility treatments; mental health and public policy; and religious attitudes towards the pandemic.

Group members

Collaborators

  • Meghan Henning (University of Dayton)

Doctoral researchers

  • Laura Smith (M4C funded Project): “Daily Martyrdom and the Suffering Feminine Body: Discourses of Female Asceticism in Late Antique Christianity”
  • Eleanor Vivian (M4C funded project): “The Function of Metaphor in the Depictions of Disability in the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls”

Events

  • February 9, 2022: Meghan Henning (University of Dayton), “Hell Hath No Fury: Gender and Disability in early Christian Tours of Hell,” Birmingham Biblical Studies Seminar
  • January 2022: Laura Smith, “Somatic Destruction, Putrefaction and Stench: The Transcending of Gender in Late Antique Asceticism” at the Gender and History: Historicising Trans Pasts Colloquium.
  • July 2021: Eleanor Vivian “The Female Body in Crisis? Applying Metaphor Theory to the Depictions of Infertility in the Hebrew Bible” British Association of Jewish Studies(BAJS) Annual Conference: 'World in Crisis', University of Southampton.
  • March 2021: Eleanor Vivian “Complicating the Category of ‘Disability’: The Role of the Body in Boundary Construction and Identity Formation in the Dead Sea Scrolls,” Categories and Boundaries in Second Temple Jewish Literature Conference, University of Birmingham.
  • Summer 2021: Candida Moss chairs the Society of Biblical Literature seminar “Disability Studies and the Bible. [465KB, .PDF]”

Select publications

  • Vivian, E. Forthcoming. “Human Reproduction and Infertility in the Hebrew Bible.” Currents in Biblical Studies.
  • Moss, C. R. 2019. Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
  • Moss. C. R. and M. Henning. “Pulling Apart and Piecing Together: Wholeness and Fragmentation in Early Christian Visions of the Afterlife.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion, forthcoming.
  • Moss, C. R. and J. Baden. 2015. Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness. Shortlisted for the AAR Textual Studies Book Prize 2016.
  • Moss, C. R. 2011. “Heavenly Healing: Eschatological Cleansing and the Resurrection of the Dead in the Early Church.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 79: 1-27.
  • Moss, C. R. and J. Schipper. 2011Disability Studies and Biblical Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Moss, C. R. 2010. “The Man with the Flow of Power: Porous Bodies in Mark 5:25-34.” Journal of Biblical Literature 129: 507-519

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