The Bible and Disability with Isaac Soon

Isaac Soon (0:01)

People don't realize that they have this kind of normal template of an able body that, well, that's what every human should be. And there's a kind of cultural inertia to push bodies in that direction, through prosthetics, through medication, through scriptural texts. I mean, access to religious buildings, for example, right? You know, everyone's welcome to this church, but, you know, if you are a wheelchair user, you can use the ramp around the back.

Dan McClellan (0:28)

Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan, and I'm Dan Beecher.

Daniel Beecher (0:31)

And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Dan McClellan (0:43)

Oh, man, I'm stoked. Today's a cool conversation. I'm looking forward to it.

I think we got some good stuff coming.

Daniel Beecher (0:51)

Yeah, I think this is going to be of great interest to folks.

Dan McClellan (0:54)

Yeah, absolutely, and a way of thinking about the Bible that I don't think most of our listeners are going to be used to. So I'm excited about that.

Daniel Beecher (1:03)

Yeah, hopefully this will provide some new tools to people who are out there looking for new lenses to put on the Bible.

And so we have a guest today. Let me introduce our guest. This is Isaac T. Soon. He is a professor of New Testament at Crandall University in New Brunswick. How are things going in New Brunswick today, Isaac?

Isaac Soon (1:24)

Yeah, very good. A couple of flurries, but we're doing all right.

Daniel Beecher (1:27)

Yeah, it was.

Dan McClellan (1:28)

Are there times when there aren't flurries? It feels like.

Isaac Soon (1:32)

Only for three months in the summer.

Daniel Beecher (1:35)

All right. Well, I had to scrape ice off my windshield this morning when I took my daughter to high school, which was we've broken that barrier for the year.

Dan McClellan (1:44)

So I don't like it.

Daniel Beecher (1:45)

I'm upset about that. Yeah, I am not OK. But Isaac recently published with Oxford University Press a book entitled A Disabled Apostle, Impairment and Disability in the Letters of Paul. And we're very excited to be talking about that book today. But I wanted to before we get into the book itself, this is a field of study that a lot of folks are not going to be familiar with.

Would you be willing to kind of walk us through disability studies a little bit, help people kind of draw a bead on what we're trying to do here?

Isaac Soon (2:17)

Sure, absolutely. Thanks for this. And thanks for the opportunity to join you guys here.

Disability studies as a wider field is about 40 or 50 years old.

Of course, with the introduction of the ADA and more access to higher education for people with disabilities, there were more and more scholars who had disabilities or experienced disability theorizing and trying to understand disability and its dynamics, of course, in concert with public accessibility and civil rights. So there's been a lot of disability studies connected in the humanities and cultural studies, sociology for a long time.

For the study of the Bible, it's a little bit younger, probably about 20 or 30 years since some of the earliest landmark works. There's one kind of a theological book, but an essential book for a lot of early Bible scholars is Nancy Eisen's The Disabled God. This is in 1995 And then we start having a number of new works in biblical studies in conversation with disability theory, disability studies, more widely in the humanities in the 2000s. So there's edited volumes by Hector Avalos, Jeremy Skipper, Candida Moss, a lot of great works. So there's been quite a few prominent scholars working in disability in New Testament, especially Old Testament and Hebrew Bible, lots more there, starting to verge in a little bit in early Christianity. But there haven't been too many book-length monographs. To date, there's only been, as far as I know, three. One is in 2018 by one of my colleagues, Louise Gosbell. She has a great book on disability studies in conversation with the Gospels. And then there's a great book by Rebecca Solfog, Renegotiating the Disabled Body by SBL Press, also in 2018, actually. And then my recent book on Paul as a disabled apostle. So there's been a lot of scholars who have been working in the field, but I think there's kind of critical momentum picking up and engaging with disability studies and disability scholars and philosophers and theorists to try and help us gain some language and understanding ancient texts.