earticle

영어

Despite excellent theological works on disability, current theological understanding of disability is insufficient to address the specific context of the parents of children with disabilities because the discourse is focused on those who are disabled, not on the parents. However, parents with children with disabilities merit deeper theological reflection because of the practical and emotional burden imposed on them. Also, the experiences of these parents have the potential to provide theology with a distinctive perspective that can enrich the body of theological knowledge about disability and all human beings. Parents themselves can provide intimate and experiential knowledge about the duality of “a world without disabilities” and “a world with disabilities.” For this reason, I conducted a narrative research interviewing mothers of children with disability and explored their lived disability theology. In this article, I introduced Alice’s narrative and provide my theological understanding of her lived disability theology. This article is my attempt to respond to the question “what is lived theology look like for parents of children with disability?” By using narrative inquiry, I explore Alice who is an artist herself and also a mother of a child with disability living in the US through narrative inquiry and offer practical theological interpretation. I argue that mother’s lived theology consists of multiple layers of different understanding of disability and that this multiplicity must be acknowledged as their living web of worldviews. In Part 1, I offer description of the concepts of “worldviews” that I propose in order to best make sense of Alice’s lived theology. In Part II, I introduce the notion of “living webs of worldviews,” appropriating Bonnie Miller McLemore’s “living human web”and Anton Boisen’s “living human document” to capture mothers’ lived theology. Finally, in Part III, I apply these concepts to analyze mothers’ lived theology more concretely. This framework is designed to evidence that mothers concurrently employ multiple worldviews regarding disabilities.