New Social Media Campaign from LOVEboldly

Inspired by posts across social media, LOVEboldly launched a new social media campaign on diversity, equity, and inclusion. We encourage our partners, friends, and others to download the graphics (below) and post them on your own socials.

While helpful at times, acronyms and abbreviations can also hide important realities. We've seen this before when certain people and organizations create monsters out of "BLM" and "Antifa." Yet, it's a lot harder to argue against Black Lives Matter or being an Anti-Fascist. In this moment, let's talk about what DEI actually means.

Please direct questions about this campaign to admin@loveboldly.net.

Disability, Part 1

Monday, February 10, 2025

Happy Monday, my friends! I always appreciate when you all write back to comment on these Monday Moments. Previously and more recently, folks have reminded me that disability and the lived experiences of people living with disabilities are often left out of theological and even pastoral discussions. Indeed, disabilities and people with disabilities are often omitted from any number of fields. Perhaps one of the factors which has limited conversations about disabilities is the fact that not all disabilities are visible. We tend to think that a disability or a person living with a disability will be immediately visible to us: a person using a wheelchair, a person walking with a white cane, or a person utilizing sign language. Yet disabilities are often invisible or barely visible to us and include chronic illness, mental illness, neurodivergence, and other differences. Though some people might consider my size and weight to be disabilities, I’m otherwise outwardly perceived as being temporarily able bodied (TAB; we’ll return to this idea below). However, I live with mental health issues (depression and anxiety), a chronic illness (type 2 diabetes), and neurodivergence (ADHD). None of those invisible disabilities either define who I am or severely limit my functioning as a human, but they are a part of who I am and how I live in and interact with the world.

One of the ways our society continues to marginalize people living with disabilities is by treating disability as an abnormality in human life. The fact is that disability is a normal part of human life. In the previous paragraph I used the phrase “temporarily able bodied” or TAB. Every person not born with a disability is considered to be temporarily able bodied, but the human body doesn’t remain that way. Injury, experience, and age all contribute to changes in our once able bodies. For some people those changes come later in life while for others they become lived realities earlier. We all know stories of elite athletes who suffer an injury and can never compete again. We know either from ourselves or the people in our lives that even the most dedicated fitness folks slow down with time. We will all become disabled, visibly and invisibly, at some point in our lives. Despite what we’ve been taught and conditioned to believe, disability is a normal part of human life.

I admit that I never thought much about disability myself until I was diagnosed with diabetes. Diabetes is a reality for both sides of my family, particularly my father’s side where it killed or quickened the deaths of many family members. For much of my life I considered diabetes to be a personal failing. When my dad or his siblings would express concern for their children, including my sister and I, contracting the disease as children, I would ignore their concerns or assign those concerns to my cousins who I perceived as even more inactive as me growing up. I definitely missed many of the warnings and warning signs in my habits and nutrition. Until I hit 35, my body did pretty well holding diabetes at bay, but one day it gave up. I had no complications, just a physician who wanted to run a few tests because of my family history. Suddenly, it seemed, I was taking multiple medications, meeting with dieticians, and trying to reign in a significant sweet tooth, something with which I continue to struggle. Disability hit me quick. Disability will hit you quick too, if it hasn’t already.

This Monday Moment is the first in a series I’m working on around ability, disability, and accessibility. Ability and disability are realities we must consider with any search for and fight for justice.

How do you think about disability? What visible or invisible disability do you live with?

Let us pray: God who we perceive as knowing no disability, but who experiences injury each time their beloved children are neglected and forced to live in a world not built for them and often intentionally built to exclude them, bless each of us living with disabilities. We recognize that disability in some form will impact us all as we continue to live into our individual and collective humanity. Grant us grace, dear God, to work with each other to achieve the greatest degree of accessibility possible for each person. Help us work to build an equitable world where each person has what they need to be no more and no less successful and free than any other person. We ask this in your name, our liberator, Amen.

Blessings on your weeks, my friends. Let me know if there is anything I can do for you.

Faithfully,

Ben  

Not Allowed

Sunday, February 9, 2025

Jonathan L. A. Morgan (he/him)

PhD Student, Claremont School of Theology

Queer Christian

You are not allowed

to use my transgender experience

to tell any other transgender person

nonbinary or binary

how to feel

or think

about their identity

body

transition or nontransition

Mine is one voice, reflecting

but one person's experience

a member of the polyphony

If I inspire you, let it be

to learn others' stories

when they are offered freely

To respect their experiences

To grow in your own understanding of

the ways in which humanity is

so fearfully and wonderfully made

For God confounds our conformity

and delights in our variation

And there is nothing you can do

to stop Hir.