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A transformative spiritual companion and deep dive into disability politics that reimagines disability in the Bible and contemporary culture A 2024 National Jewish Book Award winner and essential read on disability, spirituality, and social justice “What’s wrong with you?” Scholar, activist, and rabbi Julia Watts Belser is all too familiar with this question. What’s wrong isn’t her wheelchair, though—it’s exclusion, objectification, pity, and disdain. Our attitudes about disability have such deep cultural roots that we almost forget their sources. But open the Bible and disability is everywhere. Moses believes his stutter renders him unable to answer God’s call. Jacob’s encounter with an angel leaves him changed not just spiritually but physically: he gains a limp. For centuries, these stories have been told and retold in ways that treat disability as a metaphor for spiritual incapacity or as a challenge to be overcome. Through fresh and unexpected readings of the Bible, Loving Our Own Bones instead paints a luminous portrait of what it means to be disabled and one of God’s beloved. Belser delves deep into sacred literature, braiding the insights of disabled, feminist, Black, and queer thinkers with her own experiences as a queer disabled Jewish feminist. She talks back to biblical commentators who traffic in disability stigma and shame. What unfolds is a profound gift of disability wisdom, a radical act of spiritual imagination that can guide us all toward a powerful reckoning with each other and with our bodies. Loving Our Own Bones invites readers to claim the power and promise of spiritual dissent, and to nourish their own souls through the revolutionary art of radical self-love.
Julia Watts Belser gets stopped by strangers wanting to know what's wrong with her. But what's wrong isn't her wheelchair -- it's exclusion, objectification, pity and disdain. These attitudes about disability have such deep cultural roots we almost forget their sources. But open the Bible and disability is everywhere. Moses stutters and thinks himself unable to answer God's call. Jacob wrestles with an angel and limps forever after. Jesus heals the sick, the blind, the paralysed and the possessed. For centuries, these stories have been told and retold by commentators who treat disability as misfortune, as a metaphor for spiritual incapacity, or as a challenge to be overcome. Loving Our Own Bones turns that perspective on its head. Part spiritual companion and part political manifesto, this book cuts through objectification and inspiration alike to offer a powerful new account of disability in biblical narrative and contemporary culture. Drawing on her unique expertise as a scholar, rabbi, and disability activist, Julia Watts Belser reads biblical stories through her lived experience of life on wheels. Loving Our Own Bones shows how disability politics can help us challenge those lies -- and claim the power and promise of radical self-love.
"Rabbinic Tales of Destruction examines early Jewish accounts of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem from the perspective of the wounded body and the scarred land. Amidst stories saturated with sexual violence, enslavement, forced prostitution, disability, and bodily risk, the book argues that rabbinic narrative wrestles with the brutal body costs of Roman imperial domination. It brings disability studies, feminist theory, and new materialist ecological thought to accounts of rabbinic catastrophe, revealing how rabbinic discourses of gender, sexuality, and the body are shaped in the shadow of empire. Focusing on the Babylonian Talmud's longest account of the destruction of the Second Temple, the book reveals the distinctive sex and gender politics of Bavli Gittin. While Palestinian tales frequently castigate the "wayward woman" for sexual transgressions that imperil the nation, Bavli Gittin's stories resist portraying women's sexuality as a cause of catastrophe. Rather than castigate women's beauty as the cause of sexual sin, Bavli Gittin's tales express a strikingly egalitarian discourse that laments the vulnerability of both male and female bodies before the conqueror. Bavli Gittin's body politics align with a significant theological reorientation. Bavli Gittin does not explain catastrophe as divine chastisement. Instead of imagining God as the architect of Jewish suffering, it evokes God's empathy with the subjugated Jewish body and forges a sharp critique of empire. Its critical discourse aims to pierce the power politics of Roman conquest, to protest the brutality of imperial dominance, and to make plain the scar that Roman violence leaves upon Jewish flesh"--
This book analyzes rabbinic responses to drought and disaster, revealing how the Talmudi grapples with problems of power, ethics, and ecology in Jewish late antiquity.
Angel Bones has an introspective voice that maintains a bright understanding of the temporal. As we read, we are painfully aware the speaker is dying from cancer and death is imminent. The attempt to not only explain, but understand how to welcome and embrace death is a bittersweet calm. How can one leave willingly when there is so much left behind?
In seven nine-part poems gathered from throughout her illustrious career, Lambda award winner Judy Grahn once again demonstrates her mastery of form. Using lamentations as her uniting medium, these transgressive poems seek to sound an alarm or name the unnamable, all in a movement towards the goal of possible social change.
From celebrated New Zealand poetess F.D. Soul comes her highly anticipated second collection of poetry, prose, illustrations, and wisdom. Her messages grapple with relationships: interpersonal relationships, her relationship with herself, and the relationship between poetry and the world. Unchaptered and raw, Between You and These Bones reads much like a memoir or meditation yet maintains all the musicality of poetry. “This book is a garden, a hymn, a forgiveness. A falling back in love. It is all the pieces of light you forgot you held, remembered.”
"An African tightrope walker who cannot die gets involved with a mysterious society that's convinced the world is ending and is drafted into the fight-to-the-death Tournament of Freaks, where she learns the terrible truth of who and what she really is"--