Abstract
This chapter examines the notion of participation, especially insofar as it can inform and enact a praxis of recognition. I consider recent developments in the understanding of participation and return to the topic of memory to explore recognition through witnessing. To highlight the disparity concerning participation in ecclesial and social communities, I illustrate the challenge of inclusion for persons with disabilities. In developing participation as a significant part of accompaniment, I outline philosophical and theological dimensions of participation. I point to the gift of human finitude and limitation, characteristic of such a broader constituency of participators. I identify the importance of memory as a resource for participation. Memory contributes towards a quality of accompaniment that helps interpret, transform, and reconstruct relationships. This chapter argues that the recognition achieved through accompaniment is participation in witnessing the relational repair to our vulnerable selves and the vulnerable other that recognition advances.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. Nancy Fraser, ‘Identity, Exclusion, and Critique: A Response to Four Critics’, European Journal of Political Theory 6, no. 3 (2007): 316. Fraser identifies four types of social exclusion: economic, cultural, political, and a combination of some or all three. She argues that transformative recognition is required to correct incidents of cultural exclusion. This recognition, according to Fraser, amends the given ‘status order’, facilitating greater and more equal participation in institutional and social life (ibid.).
- 2.
Cf. Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia: The Joy of Love (London: Catholic Truth Society, 2015), 115. In this apostolic exhortation, Pope Francis suggests a pastoral care of accompaniment for separated and divorced Catholics.
- 3.
Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Liberate Yourselves by Accepting One Another’, in Human Disability and the Service of God: Reassessing Religious Practice, ed. Nancy L. Eiesland and Don E. Saliers (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1988), 110.
- 4.
Cf. John Swinton, ‘Stanley Hauerwas on Disability’, in Disability in the Christian Tradition: A Reader, ed. Brian Brock and John Swinton (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 512–24. Cf. Vanier, Becoming Human, 90.
- 5.
Cf. Molly C. Haslam, ‘Imago Dei as Relationality or Relationality: History and Construction’, in A Constructive Theology of Intellectual Disability: Human Beings as Mutuality and Response (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 106. Haslam suggests that given that persons with profound intellectual disabilities communicate through ‘no symbolic modes of responsiveness’, an alternative understanding of theological anthropology that overly prioritizes one’s cognitive and intellectual ability is required. As she argues that ‘the imago Dei in human being is understood in terms of participation in relationships of mutual responsiveness, whether symbolic or not symbolic, and not in terms of the possession of a particular, “essential” capacity, such as intellectual ability to imply signs and symbols for intentional communication or intentional agency of any kind’ (ibid., 106).
- 6.
In identifying that participation occurs in ecclesial communities and political communities, I am not suggesting that these two communities are independent and separate from one another. Institutionally, they may contrast legally and morally, yet they overlap through the multiple affiliations of their respective members. As Graham Ward observes, ‘Those characterised as the community of the Church participate in the operations of other desires…These members of the community of the Church are also members of other forms of fellowship, other bodies—industrial, commercial, agricultural, political, sporting, domestic’, Ward, Cultural Transformation, 57. Furthermore, one’s belonging to a specific community is not always apparent, as Ward further notes that ‘our lives inhabit, simultaneously, several different social imaginaries, and our living crosses back and forth through them all. In fact, some of them are probably not even articulated, because the social terrain they propose is so internalised it has become invisible: like my being white, like my moving mainly among people of a professional class’ (ibid., 134–35). It should be noted that Ward does not consider a person locked into particular social, cultural, or political groups. He acknowledges that, for persons, some communities of habitation will be more primary than others. Equally, he contends that migration between groups can occur, and drawing upon the work of Ricoeur, he suggests that such migration occurs through the assistance of the imagination (ibid., 136).
- 7.
Vanier, Becoming Human, 84.
- 8.
Ibid., 90.
- 9.
Ibid., 86.
- 10.
Ibid., 45.
- 11.
Ibid., 46.
- 12.
Ibid., 26.
- 13.
Ibid., 78.
- 14.
Ibid., 45.
- 15.
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 158.
- 16.
Ibid., 159.
- 17.
Ibid., 102.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Ibid.
- 23.
Ibid., 104.
- 24.
Ibid., 103.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Jackie Scully, ‘Disability and Vulnerability: On Bodies, Dependence and Power’, in Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy, ed. Catriona MacKenzie, Wendy Rogers, and Susan Dodds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 205.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
Ibid., 206.
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Ibid., 218.
- 33.
Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (New York: Routledge, 1992), 77.
- 34.
Ibid.
- 35.
Ibid.
- 36.
Ibid.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Ibid.
- 39.
Seyla Benhabib, ‘Deliberative Rationality and Models of Democratic Legitimacy’, Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994): 26.
- 40.
Ibid.
- 41.
Ibid., 31.
- 42.
Ibid.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Ibid., 44.
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Benhabib, Situating the Self, 80.
- 49.
Ibid., 81.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
Ibid.
- 52.
Paul Tillich, ‘The Ontological Structure and its Elements’, in Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries, ed. Mark Kline Taylor (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 144. Cf. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 168–70, 179–201.
- 53.
Julia T. Meszaros, Selfless Love and Human Flourishing in Paul Tillich and Iris Murdoch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 92.
- 54.
Ibid., 145.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
Jeanrond, A Theology of Love, 248–49.
- 57.
Mark Kline Taylor, ed., Paul Tillich: Theologian of the Boundaries (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 145.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
Ibid., 209. The opposite of participation is estrangement, where a person is denied participation and isolated from relationships (ibid.).
- 60.
Ibid., 210.
- 61.
Ibid.
- 62.
Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, Concise Theological Dictionary, ed. Cornelius Ernst and trans. Richard Strachan (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 1965), 89.
- 63.
Cf. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 141. Here Rahner explains God’s ‘self-communication’ as both God’s intervention into human history and God’s hiddenness in our personal and collective lives. Despite God’s disclosure and non-disclosure, Rahner adds that there exists a unity in God, ‘a history which really is the one true history of God himself’ (ibid., 142).
- 64.
Rahner and Vorgrimler, Concise Theological Dictionary, 337.
- 65.
Ibid.
- 66.
Ibid.
- 67.
Lorencino Bruno Puntel, ‘Participation’, in Encyclopedia of Theology: The Concise Sacramentum Mundis, ed. Karl Rahner (London: Burns and Oates, 1977), 1162.
- 68.
Ibid.
- 69.
Ibid., 1163.
- 70.
Ibid. Whilst I do not explore the term Koinonia, taken from the Greek κοινωνία, its use is implicit in my exploration of the term participation as an aspect of mutual accompaniment. Within a Christian context, koinonia is generally understood to mean fellowship or communion with God and fellow Christians. In addition, koinonia also denotes participation. Paul L. Lehmann (1906–94) argued that the Church’s ethical ministry is often carried out in discrete ways. Its ethical ministry, however, is not an ethical ministry in the political or philosophical sense. The term koinonia understood as participation gives expression to the Christian dimension of ethical care in the Church, in which Christians and the Christian community participate in God’s activity in the world. For Lehmann’s main concern was ‘with the concrete ethical reality of a transformed human being and a transformed humanity owing to the specific action of God in Jesus Christ, an action and transformation of which the reality of the Christian koinonia is a foretaste’, Paul Lehmann, Ethics in a Christian Context, intro. Wallace M. Alston Jr. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 17.
- 71.
Ibid.
- 72.
Ibid.
- 73.
Ibid.
- 74.
Ibid.
- 75.
Cf. Werner G. Jeanrond, ‘Toward a Critical Theology of Christian Praxis’ The Irish Theological Quarterly 51, no. 2 (1985): 136–45.
- 76.
Andrew Davison, Participation in God: A Study in Christian Doctrine and Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 137.
- 77.
Ibid., 141.
- 78.
Ibid., 142.
- 79.
Ibid.
- 80.
Ibid.
- 81.
Ibid.
- 82.
Ibid., 370.
- 83.
Ibid., 2.
- 84.
Ibid., 370.
- 85.
Ibid.
- 86.
Ward, How the Light Gets In, 217.
- 87.
Ibid., 218.
- 88.
Ibid.
- 89.
Ibid., 276.
- 90.
Ibid., 310.
- 91.
Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion, 21.
- 92.
Ibid., 27.
- 93.
Commentators on Honneth’s theory of recognition observe that his presentation of social progress is a concept of social normalcy. Cf. Miriam Bankovsky and Alice Le Goff, ‘Deepening Critical Theory: French Contributions to Theories of Recognition’, in Recognition Theory and Contemporary French Moral and Political Philosophy: Reopening the Dialogue, ed. Miriam Bankovsky and Alice Le Goff (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 5.
- 94.
Ibid., 73. An economy of exchange does not comprise economic interests, but stretches from a strict understanding of Marxist theory to include a variety of conditions that are constitutive of human meaning.
- 95.
Ibid., 97.
- 96.
Ashley, Interruptions, 13. Ashley presents a definition of spirituality that prioritizes the practice of participation within community life. He argues that certain practices ‘form a mystagogy into a life of Christian discipleship’ (ibid., 13). Mystagogy is traditionally the final initiation of persons into the life of Christian discipleship, whereby they are learning about Christian sacraments, prayer, and the life of discipleship. Ashley observes a twofold dynamic operative during this time. On the one hand, it is a time for the emerging seeker to participate more fully in personal prayer and in the liturgical life of the church. On the other hand, it is also a time for the Church to take on the consistent commitment of taking on Christ in the world. Thus, this liturgical time of mystagogy has implications for theology, according to Ashley. He notes that this formative experience exposes a seeker to an encounter with Christ. Yet, this participation is not a private event. Rather, it is ecclesial whereby the example of the seeker’s encounter with Christ encourages the people of God to also grow in a deeper and more generous participation in the life of Christ. In addition, Ashley also notes that such a time advances new ways of giving an account of the Christian life. As such, how one gives an account of God and the meaning of human life is expressed in novel and expanding ways, through ‘symbols, narratives, rhetorical strategies, metaphysical speculation, and so forth’ (ibid., 14).
- 97.
Deborah Beth Creamer, Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 23–34.
- 98.
Ibid., 32.
- 99.
Ibid.
- 100.
I accept that there are foundationalist concepts of the body, but this chapter illustrates the sociological understanding of human interaction, which troubles any outright acceptance of the body in its foundationalist presentation as a given.
- 101.
Creamer, Disability and Christian Theology, 32.
- 102.
Ibid.
- 103.
Ibid., 54.
- 104.
Ibid.
- 105.
Ibid., 55.
- 106.
L’Arche communities are exemplary of such communities that are defined by accompaniment in their mission to expand and strengthen the participation of disabled people in the life of local communities.
- 107.
Creamer, Disability and Christian Theology, 55.
- 108.
Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion, 161.
- 109.
Creamer, Disability and Christian Theology, 57.
- 110.
Richard Hobbs, C. Elizabeth Bonham, and Jennifer Fogo, ‘Individuals with Disabilities: Critical Factors that Facilitate Integration in Christian Religious Communities’, Journal of Rehabilitation 82, no. 1 (2016): 44.
- 111.
Marcia Webb, Anna M. Charbonneau, Russell A. McCann, and Kristin R. Gayle, ‘Struggling and Enduring with God, Religious Support, and Recovery From Severe Mental Illness’, Journal of Clinical Psychology 67, no. 12 (2011): 1162.
- 112.
Ibid.
- 113.
Sue Campbell, ‘Challenges to Memory in Political Contexts’, in Our Faithfulness to the Past: The Ethics and Politics of Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 198.
- 114.
Ibid., 166.
- 115.
Ibid.
- 116.
Cf. Jayne Clapton, ‘Disability, Inclusion and the Christian Church: Practice, Paradox or Promise’, Disability and Rehabilitation 19, no. 10 (2009): 420–26. Clapton, like Reynolds, takes aim at what she perceives as the cult of normalcy within Western thought. In particular, she observes that difference was conceived in a binary-like fashion, such as male/female, straight/gay, or abled/disabled. In her estimation, these binaries generated a power dynamic, whereby one dominated the other and created the other as a result of the perceived difference. She is drawing upon the insights of Susan Wendell, The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability (New York: Routledge, 1996), 40, 92. Apart from cataloguing Wendell’s observations on disability and Western thought, Clapton’s particular angle on the question of disability and theology is presented as a matter of biography. She notes as a young child being informed of a sibling who was stillborn. This experience formed within her family a frame or ‘gaze’ of perceiving persons with disabilities in a welcoming and affirming manner. Thus, she makes the following argument: ‘Therefore, it is our perception of relationships which embrace embodied difference that not only textures, but rather constitutes, the socio-moral fabrics of inclusion or exclusion’ (Clapton, ‘Disability, Inclusion, and the Christian Church’, 425). See also Hans Reinders, ‘Doing Theology and Disability in Europe’, Journal of Religion, Disability and Health 16, no. 4 (2012): 439–42. Reinders notes two somewhat recent conferences, where the positive contribution of disability studies emerged in a number of those presenting papers. First, the Society for the Study of Christian Ethics gathered for their annual conference in Cambridge, UK, in 2012. Reinders relayed that the meeting had as its central concern the question of theological anthropology. As the article notes, the substantialist approach to this overarching topic was troubled by a number of scholars who sought to tackle the conference’s topic through the frame of disability studies. The outcome of this, and for my purposes it is worth noting here, was that the question of theological anthropology moved from a discussion concerning one’s capacities with respect to reason and will to that of the human person in light of mutuality and vulnerability. More significantly, and echoing Butler’s suggestion on transparency and the human person, the theological conversation moved in the direction of limited self-knowledge and self-determination (ibid., 441–42). Reinders, like Reynolds, observes the effect of a culture of choice in the establishment of religion as a private matter within European societies. The net effect of this, according to the author, is that theology ‘has been relegated to the study of the phenomena of spiritual life in the domain of human subjectivity’ (ibid., 440). Reinders is of the opinion that in North America, the question of disability and theology is a political question and, as he suggests, the question falls within the realm of practical questions (ibid.).
- 117.
Thomas E. Reynolds, ‘Past and Present with Disability in the Christian Tradition’, Journal of Religion, Disability and Health 17, no. 3 (2013): 288.
- 118.
Ibid.
- 119.
Fraser, ‘Identity, Exclusion, and Critique’, 315.
- 120.
Ibid.
- 121.
Ibid.
- 122.
Ibid.
- 123.
Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion, 210.
- 124.
Ibid., 17. Reynolds borrows the phrase ‘dangerous memory’ from Metz, Faith in History and Society, 66.
- 125.
Ibid.
- 126.
Ibid., 67.
- 127.
Ibid., 289.
- 128.
Ibid.
- 129.
Ibid.
- 130.
Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 132.
- 131.
Volf, ‘Difference, Violence, and Memory’, Irish Theological Quarterly 74, no. 1 (2009): 6. Volf proposes what he calls right remembering. His specific presentation of remembering is an aspect of redemption within Christian theology.
- 132.
Honneth, ‘Reflection’, 317.
- 133.
Ibid.
- 134.
Ibid.
- 135.
Ibid.
- 136.
Ibid.
- 137.
Ibid., 318.
- 138.
Ibid.
- 139.
Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 135.
- 140.
Ibid., 9.
- 141.
Ibid., 10.
- 142.
Ibid.
- 143.
Ibid.
- 144.
Ibid., 11. It is worth noting that Volf excludes the ministry of Christ.
- 145.
Ibid.
- 146.
Ibid.
- 147.
Metz, Faith in History and Society, 169.
- 148.
Ibid.
- 149.
Ibid.
- 150.
Ibid., 171.
- 151.
Ibid.
- 152.
Ibid.
- 153.
Ibid.
- 154.
Ibid., 172.
- 155.
Ibid.
- 156.
Ibid., 182.
- 157.
Ibid.
- 158.
Ibid.
- 159.
Ibid.
- 160.
Ibid., 183.
- 161.
Ibid.
- 162.
Ibid.
- 163.
Ibid.
- 164.
Ibid., 184.
- 165.
Ibid.
- 166.
Reynolds, Vulnerable Communion, 298.
- 167.
Ibid., 290.
- 168.
Ibid.
- 169.
Ibid.
- 170.
Oliver, Kelly. “Witnessing, Recognition, and Response Ethics.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 48 no. 4, 2015, 478.
- 171.
Ibid., 479.
- 172.
Ibid.
- 173.
Ibid., 481.
- 174.
Ibid.
- 175.
Ibid.
- 176.
Ibid.
- 177.
Ibid.
- 178.
Ibid.
- 179.
Ibid., 482.
- 180.
Ibid.
- 181.
Ibid.
- 182.
Ibid., 483.
- 183.
Ibid.
- 184.
Ibid., 485.
- 185.
Ibid.
- 186.
Ibid.
- 187.
Ibid., 486.
- 188.
Ibid., 488.
- 189.
Ibid., 489.
- 190.
Ibid., 489.
- 191.
Ibid.
- 192.
Ibid., 491.
- 193.
Ibid.
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Ryan, G.J. (2022). Disability as a Context for Theological Reflection on Recognition. In: Mutual Accompaniment as Faith-Filled Living. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06007-6_5
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