RespectAbility hosted a conversation with leading scholars of Christian Disability Theology about representations of disability in the Second Testament. Learn from our panelists about alternative interpretations to sacred text and how these shifts in perspective can help to nurture belonging for disabled and pre-disabled people in local church contexts.
Speaker Bios
Dr. Amy Kenny is a disabled scholar-practitioner whose writing has been featured in Teen Vogue, Sojourners, Shondaland, Reader’s Digest, Huff Post, and in her award-winning book, My Body Is Not a Prayer Request. She served on the Mayor’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion taskforce, and as a facilitator for Freedom Road Institute for Leadership and Justice. She is currently the inaugural Director of the Disability Cultural Center at Georgetown University, which seeks to celebrate the diverse disability community and cultivate a culture of access across campus.
Dr. Lamar Hardwick (D.Min.Liberty University) also known as “the autism pastor” is a pastor, cancer survivor, PhD student and award winning author focused on the intersection of disability, race, and religion. Hardwick was diagnosed with Autism at the age of thirty-six. He provides workshops and consults with businesses, churches, universities, and faith-based organizations on becoming more disability inclusive. He is a graduate of Candler School of Theology at Emory University, the Clergy Scholar Program at Yale Divinity, and a 2017 graduate of Georgia Forward’s Young Game Changers program. He has authored four books including his most recent book, How Ableism Fuels Racism: Dismantling the Hierarchy of Bodies in the Church (Brazos Press 2024).
Angela Molloy is a Faith Inclusion and Belonging Fellow in RespectAbility’s National Leadership Program for Spring 2024. Molloy is a queer and congenitally disabled scholar-activist from Edmonds, Washington who holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Comparative Religion from the University of Washington and is currently wrapping up her final year of seminary at Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado. As co-chair of the Disability Ministries Committee for the Pacific Northwest Conference of the United Methodist Church (UMC), she is particularly interested in how congenital disability is perceived and how belonging is nurtured (or, unfortunately, not) for disabled folx within the Methodist context. Called to work with and on behalf of disability communities to disrupt ableist systems, she plans to pursue doctoral work in the field of Disability Theology in order to teach the next generation of religious leaders a more life-affirming way.
Rev. Ben Bond (He/They) is the Associate, Faith Inclusion and Belonging, at RespectAbility. Ben is ordained in The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) which is a mainline progressive Christian denomination in the United States and Canada. Ben is a queer multiply disabled person with lived experience both growing up with a disability and acquiring one later in life. Faith inclusion and disability have been at the center of their work for many years. Ben founded and co-chaired Yale Divinity School’s first disability student organization named DivineAbilities which was dedicated to centering disability issues at an institutional level as well as providing a space for students to explore interpersonally their relationship between disability and faith communities.
