As someone outside the disability community, I thought myself an unlikely choice to write a book about the faith dimension of disability. Over two decades as a religion writer for daily newspapers, I had written just a handful of stories about the subject.
But the Alban Institute, a religion think tank, explained that in many ways I represented exactly the kind of reader they sought – people of faith without expertise or personal experience with disability. In the main, these were the congregation members and clergy who make the accessibility and inclusion decisions about their houses of worship. While plenty of valuable resource manuals exist, there was a need for stories that grip hearts and minds, showing struggles and solutions.
What I didn’t realize was how much writing this book – eventually titled Amazing Gifts: Stories of Faith, Disability and Inclusion– would change my own life and the way I see and interact with people with disabilities. I learned many things, most of them simple, which in retrospect should have been obvious.
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