Power Grid Blog
Amazing Gifts: Stories of Faith, Disability, and Inclusion
February 17, 2012 | AAPD Power Grid Blog Team
by Jenna Lenskold, AAPD Communications Intern
Amazing Gifts, released today by the Alban Institute, is one of those rare books that educates without feeling like a homework assignment. The compilation of 64 stories about people of faith who have disabilities inspires the reader with a sense of possibility, capability, and faith. Amazing Gifts does so by combining stories about real people from all across America, allowing the stories themselves to illustrate how fundamental faith is to human experience without preaching a specific religious message. At the same time, it speaks powerfully to what can occur once people with disabilities tell their stories.
AAPD’s Interfaith Initiative Director, Ginny Thornburgh, was the driving force behind this book. Ginny brought her perspectives as a former teacher, a person of faith, the convener of the Interfaith Disability Advocacy Coalition, and most particularly as mother to Peter, a man of faith who has both intellectual and physical disabilities, to the project that became Amazing Gifts.
I spoke with Ginny about this project. “Like all projects, Amazing Gifts started out as an idea. Over two decades of work in the disability community, I had listened to the stories of children and adults being honored, enjoyed, and included in their churches, synagogues, mosques and temples. Sometimes the inclusion was easy and straightforward. Other times it was painful and complicated. I determined that these stories needed to be gathered and told in a way that would move the hearts and minds of the reader.”
Amazing Gifts was written by religion writer Mark I. Pinsky, but the stories came from 64 individuals from varied religious backgrounds who have a disability or are close to a person with a disability. Each story can stand well on its own as a thought-provoking portrait of one real human being. Together, they are a powerful portrait of humanity itself— who we are, how we deal with adversity and the role that faith plays in the most dramatic events in our lives, as well as our everyday life.
Along the journey through Amazing Gifts, the reader will meet Vidya Bhushan Gupta who provided counseling services to a Hindu man whose daughter had ADHD, severe nonverbal learning disability, and bipolar disorder. The family looked to their faith for strength and guidance. In the story “A Safe Venue” we meet multiple veterans who have disabilities resulting from their military service. The time the veterans spent with congregations eased their transition back to civilian life. Reverend Mary Heron shares her story of waking up deaf from a knee surgery and how the Broadway Christian Church spent $1,000 to install FM radio signal wires to transmit sound to receiving devices for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. In “The Right to Kindness and Charity” the reader will meet Laila, an African American Muslim who is conflicted between following her Muslim roots of caring for her family or getting her mother better care in a nursing home. Laila urges others to understand that sometimes a situation is out of one’s control. These stories and all of the others paint a picture of the benefits of including people with disabilities in communities of faith.
To read excerpts from Amazing Gifts, click here.
To purchase Amazing Gifts, click here.
