Fall 2023 Call
for Content 

Announcing a forthcoming anthology by the Mad and Crip Theology Press, co-edited by Naomi Jacobs and Amy Panton. Working title: Our Disability Theologies: Voices from Mad and Crip Communities on Our Body-Minds and God-Talk.

 

This will be a book by disabled people. The editors are looking for chapters about the ways our experiences of disability and disabled body-minds shape our theologies. The book will aim to take lived disability theology seriously, as an authentic [source] of thinking about theology, researching religions, and relating to God.

 

"The world we know is the world projected by our bodies," writes blind theologian John M. Hull [2013: 62]. Disability influences the ways we think about faith and relate to the divine. Our embodied experiences and social contexts can have a profound impact on our God-talk. And if our “social and historical context decides not only the questions we address to God but also the mode or form of the answers given to the questions” [Cone 1975: 15], then our experiences of disability may also influence the methods and theories we use in our research on religions.

 

What kinds of content are we looking for?

 

We would welcome:

• Academic theology that draws on your own lived experience, and the experiences of your communities

• Research on disability and religion, either qualitative or quantitative

• Personal reflections on how disability shapes your thinking about - and practice of - faith

• Creative submissions, including poetry, on this theme

 

What themes will the book explore?

 

You may want to write about:

• How experiences of disability have impacted the ways you think, write and talk about God and your everyday practice of faith 

• Embodiment and its role in your experience of prayer, worship, liturgy, or ministry

• How personal experience informs "the questions you address to God" - how it shapes your research methodologies, your academic theology, or your thinking about God more generally

• Experiences of embodiment and theologies of (for example) the incarnation

• How disabled images of God have led you to think or relate to God in new ways

• Theologies from the edge - how does your experience of marginalisation shape your thinking about the God of the margins?

• Access to religious communities and their buildings - how access impacts your faith and thinking about God

• Healing prayer and ministry, and how it has changed your relationship to your body - and/or how your body has led you think differently about healing and cure

• Intersectionality - multiple experiences of oppression, and how these experiences shape your theologies

• How your leadership in faith communities is impacted by your experiences of disability

• Contextual theologies of justice - how experiences of disability oppression and injustice have led you to explore theologies of disability justice

• Reflections on experiences of disability-related exclusion from faith spaces and ways to challenge this 

These themes are just suggestions. We would welcome submissions that take the idea of lived disability theology in a different direction.

 

Who can submit? 

 

We welcome submissions from authors reflecting on their own experiences and theologies of: 

 

• disability

• chronic and long-term illness

• deafness and Deaf culture

• neurodiversity 

• mental distress

 

We would also like to hear from authors who move in the messy 'grey areas' of disability in their lives and theologies, perhaps who are reluctant to define as disabled, who disagree with their mental health diagnosis/label, or who think differently about their identity in different contexts.

 

However, we are not accepting submissions from non-disabled authors.  

 

Finally, you do not need to be an academic to submit, and you do not have to be previously published. We are delighted to work with first-time authors. 

 

Accessible language

 

While we are keen to include academic submissions, we want to ensure that the book is accessible to many readers. Language should be clear, and readable, free of jargon.

 

How to submit

 

Please submit a one-page pitch, by [28 February 2024], including:

• an idea or abstract of no more than 150 words 

• a short biography

Send your submission to Amy Panton at amy@madandcriptheologypress.ca or Naomi Lawson Jacobs at naomilawsonjacobs@bantrybridge.com. We may ask for a sample of your writing, to help with our decision. 

 

We will let you know by [31 March 2024] if your submission has been selected, subject to an editorial process. Completed chapters will be due by [30th July 2024].

 

Chapters should be 2,000-5000 words. We're happy to consider shorter lengths for creative work. Guidelines for formatting and referencing will be sent to authors shortlisted for inclusion in the book.

 

If you have an idea for a chapter but you are not sure whether it might fit the book, please email Naomi or Amy for an informal discussion.