Crippled Grace: Disability, Virtue Ethics, and the Good Life by Shane Clifton (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Crippled Grace: Disability, Virtue Ethics, and the Good Life by Shane Clifton Maureen Pratt MTS, MFA (bio) Crippled Grace: Disability, Virtue Ethics, and the Good Life. By Shane Clifton. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2018. 285 pp. $44.99 pbk/ $42.74 eb. A few years after my diagnosis of disabling lupus, a Christian friend asked if I was "over it" yet. When I explained that lupus is a chronic condition with no medical cure, my friend said, "You're not cured because you're not faithful enough." This encounter, a discomforting and disheartening reminder of how entrenched some uncompassionate attitudes toward virtue and health still are, resurfaced in my mind several times as I read Shane Clifton's Crippled Grace: Disability, Virtue Ethics, and the Good Life. In this profound and provocative book, Clifton reflects on two central questions: what is the significance of the Christian virtue tradition for the happiness (flourishing) of people with disabilities, and might disability itself offer "fresh insight into how we should understand flourishing?" (225) A theologian by training—"ecumenical and liberal (by which I mean open-minded in inclination)" (3), Clifton is honorary associate and professor at the Centre of Disability Research and Policy in the faculty of health sciences at the University of Sydney. However, perhaps even more important than his academic bona fides is his lived experience as an adult abruptly thrust into personal disability through a bicycle accident that rendered him a quadriplegic. This experience provides indispensable, authentic (and very honest) context to Clifton's reflections and, with the other narratives he includes in the book, brings what might have otherwise been a detached work into compelling, personal conversation with the subject matter and the reader. Prior to his accident, Clifton admits he had read nothing about disability, a comment perhaps not surprising; "disability is marginal to theological reflection" (151). Afterward, totally inter/dependent on others for all his care and slipping "into a deepening unhappiness" (4), he describes picking up a book he had begun reading pre-accident: Alistair MacIntyre's Dependent Rational Animals. There, he "discovered within its pages a spark of hope" and began to consider how the Christian virtue tradition could inform a way of "conceiving of happiness that could transcend my disability: happiness as a life lived well in and through its difficulties" (4). This inquiry, richly developed in the book, leads him not only to reflect on the historical and contemporary social reality of disability and its attendant duality, suffering and joy, but also to apply a hermeneutic of disability (and at times one of suspicion) on traditionally conceived theological and philosophical notions of the nature and practice of virtue, the attainment of happiness, and what it means to live a "good" life. After an introduction to his personal and professional story and approach to the "complex" subject of disability, chapter 3, which could have been a book on its own, offers Clifton's reflections on Christian virtue tradition mapped through Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament. These sources highlight the many ways in which disability and disabled persons are marginalized and suggest that the tradition is inclined to support a "status quo" that favors able-ness as the ideal. Aristotle, for example, would hold it is "impossible [End Page 173] for the disabled person to be truly happy" (57). Someone who is physically limited and dependent on others cannot freely choose or exercise virtues contributing to flourishing. Friendship of equals is impossible between someone who is disabled and someone who is not. The "virtuous" person is not dependent on others, and disability, by nature, requires dependence. Clifton shows that in the Hebrew Bible, disability is ubiquitous in descriptions of persons and woven into the texts' linguistic tapestry by the authors, although this is "rarely acknowledged by biblical scholars" (61). In Deuteronomy 23:2, for example, disfigured persons (the disabled) are excluded from the sanctuary since disability is believed to be the consequence of disobedience or a sign of God's punishment. Further, "denigrating" metaphors are scattered throughout the text (e.g., "a blind man gropes in darkness") (61). The effect of these and other texts on people...