Blogaround

Photo of the earth, taken from the Artemis II space ship. Image source.

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. The Touch - Stan Bush (HD Restoration) A song from some 1986 transformers movie.

I watched this video with my son standing next to me telling me the Chinese names of all the transformers. None of the pregnancy books prepared me for how much transformers lore I would be required to learn as a parent.

2. Artemis II astronauts swung by the moon, broke an Apollo record, and saw an eclipse (April 7) "Just minutes later, the crew reached the mission's maximum distance from Earth at 252,756 miles, beating the previous record set by the Apollo 13 mission in 1970 by 4,111 more miles."

3. These blind students say their college blocked their education. A new rule could help (April 6) "For many assignments – say a PDF document from a professor – most students simply click "download," and read it. But that same assignment is more complicated for students who are blind."

4. In 1978, they stopped buses — and helped launch a disability rights movement (April 3) "The Gang of 19, as they'd be called, demanded that the city install wheelchair lifts on more than 200 newly-ordered buses, so they could ride public transit. The protest lasted some 24 hours. At night, some of the protesters got out of their wheelchairs and slept on the hard asphalt."

5. Day Counter (April 3) From xkcd.

6. On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: "The Master's Tools" in Tech Discourse (March 28, via) "A decolonial critique of technology is not simply "the internet was always bad." It is rather: the conditions that made the internet harmful to specific communities were never peripheral to its design; they're an integral part of it. And any politics that aims to restore something like the pre-enshittification internet without reckoning with those conditions is doomed to reproduce them."

7. When Genomes Fail: Serial Cloning, Mutation Accumulation, and the Case Against Creationist’ Genetic Entropy (April 6) "By the 57th generation, the mice carried approximately 3,700 single-nucleotide variants, 80 insertions or deletions, and at least 16 large structural variants that had not been present in the original donor. The birth rate declined steadily after generation 27, and the 58th generation was the last. Every mouse born in that final generation died within a day."

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Links related to the antichrist:

1. The president is posting on social media to threaten genocide. He must be removed from office.

Trump post on Truth Social: "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to ​be brought back ​again. I don’t want that ‌to ⁠happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We ⁠will find out tonight, one of ​the most important ​moments ⁠in the long and complex history of ⁠the ​World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!"

We have the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Now is the time to use it. (April 8) "Any federal official who does not respond to Tuesday’s threat in a manner befitting their own constitutional obligations in light of Trump’s past actions will bear a part of the responsibility for what follows."

2. Trump fires Pam Bondi as attorney general (April 2)

Pam Bondi is out — and that is a good thing. She was Trump's lawyer, and DOJ paid the price. (April 3) "She has caused incalculable harm to the Department, the rule of law, and the nation. All in service of Trump. That is, and will always be, her legacy."

3. She paid into Medicare for years. Trump's immigration policy will end her coverage (April 6) "She's contributed tens of thousands of dollars into Medicare and Social Security over 24 years, according to her Social Security Administration earnings record, reviewed by El Tímpano and KFF Health News. But Carranza and an estimated 100,000 other lawfully present immigrants will soon be cut out of Medicare."

Blogaround

Links not related to the antichrist:

1. On 310 Yuan a Day, She Builds China’s Towers — and Streams the Struggle (February 25) "This is her sixth year bouncing between construction sites across China. As one of the few young women in a workforce dominated by middle-aged men, she stands out immediately — not just for her age or gender, but for her determination to survive."

2. Remembering the Mothers of Gynecology (February 28) "But like a lot of early heroes of medicine, Sims was an absolute monster."

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Image source.

Links related to the antichrist:

1. A Chance To Establish The Run Against Authoritarianism (February 12) This is something we can do to help the families who have been hiding for weeks in Minnesota. Donate to funds to help with rent.

2. The U.S. Men's Hockey Team Failed the Locker Room Test (February 25) "I can’t help but wonder how many of these players have daughters—and whether they’ve told them that they can be hockey players one day, too. How many have told them that the women’s game matters just as much? Do they think their girls will still believe them after they hear their dads laugh?"

3. Deadline looms as Anthropic rejects Pentagon demands it remove AI safeguards (February 26) "For months, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has insisted that Anthropic's AI model, Claude, must not be used for mass surveillance in the U.S. or to power entirely autonomous weapons, such as a drone that uses AI to kill targets without human approval. He has described those uses as 'entirely illegitimate' and says they are 'bright red lines' for the company."

OpenAI announces Pentagon deal after Trump bans Anthropic (February 28)

4. A nearly blind refugee is found dead after Border Patrol agents drop him at Buffalo doughnut shop (February 27) "'A vulnerable man — nearly blind and unable to speak English — was left alone on a cold winter night with no known attempt to leave him in a safe, secure location. That decision from U.S. Customs and Border Protection was unprofessional and inhumane,' Mayor Sean Ryan said in a statement."

5. Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, And The Construction Of Political Crisis (February 21) [content note: child sexual abuse] "The broad Epstein files scandal is already salient. But the questions of how it will ultimately be understood, and where political accountability will fall, are still up for grabs. Is this mostly a story about elite impunity, bipartisan failure, bureaucratic incompetence and/or corruption? Or will it be just as much a story about how the country was deceived into electing a sex predator angling to cover up his own crimes and got caught. Where we look back and say there was a specific moment when the government had to decide whether there would be any consequences for this depravity, and we, the public, got to see in real time who tried to do the right thing and who sided with the dregs of humanity?"

6. Vanderbilt To Drop Major Gender-Affirming Surgeries For Trans Adults (February 24) "It was only after reaching out to VUMC that she received a message in her patient portal—a pattern seen across the country, where hospital gender care rollbacks have often been haphazardly announced through terse press releases from nameless hospital bureaucrats."

Also from Erin in the Morning: Kansas Sends Letters To Trans People Demanding The Immediate Surrender Of Drivers Licenses (February 26) "The Kansas letters arrive amid an accelerating nationwide campaign to strip transgender people of accurate identification documents."

7. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been killed (February 28)

3 American troops killed, and Trump says more 'likely,' in war against Iran (March 1)

8. Federal judge blocks new DHS policy that would allow arrest of thousands of legal refugees (February 28) "'The Government’s actions in this case beg the question: Why?' Tunheim wrote. 'The Government suggests that they are looking for terrorists, but there is not a shred of evidence in the record that the Named Plaintiffs or the putative Class they seek to represent pose serious national security risks.'"

Blogaround

1. The tragedy of the murdered missionaries (June 12) "So when the State Department tells you to stay the F out, maybe THAT is God speaking to you."

This is a blog post written by someone who grew up as a missionary kid. I relate to some of this because I was very influenced by evangelical missions ideology back in the day- it was a huge factor in my decision to move to China. The thing that strikes me, reading this now, is I'm realizing I've always had the assumption that the best way to help poor people in other countries is to go there yourself. And not as some shallow "poverty tourism" thing, but really give up your whole affluent lifestyle and dedicate yourself to living in their culture, submitting yourself to learning a foreign language, truly internalizing the idea that you're not better than anyone else. That would certainly be the biggest sacrifice on the part of the missionary- and therefore I had the unquestioned assumption that it would do the most good. But, wait, actually that's kinda self-centered, isn't it? The idea that "this is the most difficult thing that *I* can do, therefore it must give *them* the most benefit." Maybe that's completely wrong. Maybe giving up your American lifestyle doesn't necessarily help more than, say, staying in the US and raising money for local people there who know what's what better than you do.

Also in her blog post, the whole part about how the US government issued travel warnings telling US citizens NOT to go to Haiti. Reminds me of when the US government issued travel warnings about China, during the zero-covid times, but I stayed here anyway...

2. Kamala Harris Releases First Presidential Campaign Ad (July 26) Oh I like this.

3. China Makes More Films Accessible for Blind People (July 29) "Audio description — often referred to as 'barrier-free movies' in China — is a separate soundtrack that plays simultaneously during a movie, describing the action as it is happening for blind and visually impaired viewers."

4. Trump tells supporters they ‘won’t have to vote’ again if he wins (July 29) What on EARTH. 

5. Brad Pitt Distantly Related to Barack Obama? (July 24) "The president shares an 18th-century Virginia ancestor with the superstar actor-producer. Edwin Hickman, who died in 1769, connects Obama and Pitt as ninth cousins."

Also from Snopes: Las Vegas Sphere Showed 'Blue Screen of Death'? (July 19) I saw this picture on social media and thought it was real- turns out it is fake. So, don't believe everything you see on the internet.

6. OnlySky relaunches with a focus on the future (July 28) 

7. Stephen Nedoroscik COMES THROUGH on pommel horse in U.S. bronze medal effort | Paris Olympics (July 30) Holy crap this is incredible.

8. This post about "Iron Man 2." (July 30) "It was TENSE AS SHIT, and I get the impression that the people making the movie weren't entirely aware of that?"

9. A Halfhearted Critique of Flag Culture (July 31) "It's not just the attention to or investment in flags, but the centrality of flags as a basis of activity, to the point of putting flags first, community second. These priorities become clear once you've seen people autocratically announcing flag designs for demographics that the designer isn't part of or communities that don't even exist yet (or may never exist)—as if declaring 'the flag' on other people's behalf is some kind of friendly supportive behavior rather than something presumptuous, misleading, and rude."

Blogaround

1. Acausally Asexual (July 2) "Implicitly: if you ever identify another cause, then you’ve delegitimized your orientation, and discovered that it was never a sexual orientation to begin with. I have some issues with this, to put it mildly."

2. No Kings (July 1)

3. Standard pregnancy care is now dangerously disrupted in Louisiana, report reveals (March 19, via) "'Which is ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous,' said Freehill. 'The least safe thing that we do, no matter if it's early in pregnancy or full-term at your due date, is a C-section.'"

4. Shanghai’s Metro, Through the Eyes of a Guide Dog (July 5)

Also from Sixth Tone: Chinese Cities Roll Back Pandemic-Era Tourist Site Ticketing Systems (July 8) Yeah, during zero-covid, every park or museum you went to in China required you to book tickets with your real name and id number, so they could track you down if someone turned up covid-positive nearby. It's kind of a pain! And why do they need to collect all this information on us? Glad to see a lot of places discontinuing this.

5. Call For Submissions: July / August 2024 (July 7) "I'm self-hosting the Gender Exploration Carnival with the theme of "Flags" for July and August of 2024."

6. Bracket Symbols (July 3) Very useful xkcd!

7. Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charge (July 9) "Boeing has agreed to plead guilty to a criminal fraud conspiracy charge after the US found the company violated a deal meant to reform it after two fatal crashes by its 737 Max planes that killed 346 passengers and crew."

Blogaround

1. This xkcd comic about credit card rewards. Because this is exactly how I think...

2. Chinese eagerly await return of panda from US zoo (April 11) "But in recent times, Memphis Zoo has been grilled by Chinese netizens over accusations that Ya Ya and Le Le had been mistreated during their stay."

3. World Book Day: A Bookstore for the Blind (April 23) "China is home to 17 million visually impaired people, who often face barriers entering the workforce and even colleges due to a lack of braille exam papers. China only has one braille press, and there were 959 braille libraries nationwide as of 2017, but many people aren’t aware of them."

Also from Sixth Tone: Holiday Hustle: In China, Most Resent Trading Weekends for Time Off (April 25) "Since 1999, the government has created longer vacations by swapping working days with weekends preceding and following the holiday." Yeah, we get 1 day off for May 1 (Labor Day), but they moved the weekends around to make it 5 days in a row.

One criticism I have for Sixth Tone's article- it says "China’s public holiday system, which allows employees to trade weekends for longer holidays" which makes it sound like we have a choice. Lol, no, we don't have a choice. This is the work schedule set by the government. Sunday, April 23 and Saturday, May 6 are work days. If you don't want to work on those weekend days, you have to use your own vacation days for that.

4. Community Memory and the Search for Unassailable Abuse (April 23) "This pressure to turn our worst and most painful experiences into argument fodder is part of what I aimed to highlight in The Glossary & The Gristmill — a post about how our own community is contributing, in part, to why it feels like certain stories can’t be told. When community dynamics dictate that argument fodder is the top priority, that creates inhibitions against sharing our stories."

5. Preston Sprinkle’s strange interview with Sheila Gregoire and Rebecca Lindenbach (April 13) "In one of the creepiest moments of the podcast, Sprinkle told of an experience he had at a local coffee shop." 

Also, Preston Sprinkle hasn't heard of Brio magazine. It was a magazine for teen girls, published by Focus on the Family, which promoted a lot of "purity" teaching. I read it all the time in high school. To be fair, though, Sprinkle's work is more along the lines of "how to pretend to be an ally to LGBTQ people", rather than "here are the reasons women and girls in the church have internalized sexual shame."

6. Mattel unveils a Barbie with Down syndrome (April 25) "'Our goal is to enable all children to see themselves in Barbie, while also encouraging children to play with dolls who do not look like themselves. Doll play outside of a child's own lived experience can teach understanding and build a greater sense of empathy, leading to a more accepting world,' McKnight said."

7. Ex-officer who fatally shot Breonna Taylor hired as a deputy (April 25)

8. The kingdom of heaven is like: Lizzo brings drag queens on stage at her Knoxville show to protest law (April 23)

9. Dragon catches on fire during Disneyland’s ‘Fantasmic’ show (April 23) Wow!

10. Tucker Carlson departs Fox News, pushed out by Rupert Murdoch (April 24)

11. Ranking the Pain of Stinging Insects, From ‘Spicy’ to ‘Shockingly Electric’ (April 24, via) [content note: article has a few images of bugs] This is about Justin Schmidt, a scientist who went around getting stung by various insects (over 1000 times) so he could compare them all objectively. 

Blogaround

1. The kingdom of heaven is like: Legal quirk allows gay couples in China to get married online in conservative Utah (October 6). I love this!

2. You CANNOT and MUST NOT Solve This Sudoku (October 3) 1-hour-35-minute sudoku solve video, with a very advanced ruleset. (This puzzle illustrates the concept of a "deadly pattern" very well.) I love this. Here are my favorite quotes:

• 55 minutes, with not one single digit in the grid yet: "And if this doesn't work, I'm turning the camera off, because my brain, my brain is already shot to pieces."
• 1 hr 03 min: "Have we been doing sudoku? That is a philosophical question."
• 1 hr 19 min: "What an extraordinary puzzle this is. Imagine if I don't manage to solve it now. I will probably cry, actually. I will probably cry, because this is, it's amazing. It's amazing."

3. Biblical Womanhood T-Shirt. I love this!

T-shirt that has a drawing of a tent peg through a skull, and says "Biblical Womanhood, Judges 4-5"

4. Sign o’ the times, mess with your mind, hurry before it’s 2 late (October 4) "We were 16 years old and our pastor, youth pastor, and the Bible teacher at our Christian school were all assuring us that we’d never be 26."

5. Forced Birth is Torture. (September 22) [content note: medical/pregnancy trauma. Mother and baby survive, fortunately] "What happened next was several hours of careful cutting and suction and burning and stitching while I lay with my arms strapped down and the baby wailed."

6. If the Media Are Reluctant To Properly Label the GOP’s Racist, Christian Nationalist Ideologies, We’ll Have Trouble Hanging on to Democracy (May 20) "Every time a Republican who has voiced “Great Replacement” views in the past is interviewed, he or she needs to be explicitly asked about it—and if they don’t actively disavow their past claims, it needs to be stated that they subscribe to white nationalist ideology—an ideology that has killed hundreds in the US in the last years alone, and millions in the last century worldwide."

7. The New York Times Has Badly Lost Its Bearings (May 13) 

8. I Opposed Abortion Until I Fought To Defeat Personhood In Mississippi. Here’s Why. (May 25) "'We’re just trying to get the amendment on the ballot. That’ll all get figured out later.' The brush-off chilled me. I had an ectopic pregnancy in 2004 and, unfortunately, that is not a pregnancy that will survive. It must be terminated, or the mother will die."

9. What Jesus Said to the Homeless Man (October 2) "In my experience, one hundred percent of people experiencing homelessness battle demons every day."

10. ‘Graduation Day’ for Guide Dogs Highlights Their Rarity in China (October 10) "However, the number of guide dogs in the country is grossly inadequate — a 2019 report by the China Association of the Blind said there were fewer than 200 guide dogs for a country with about 17 million people with visual impairments."

11. Rochester to pay $12M to settle lawsuit filed by Daniel Prude family, largest civil rights settlement in city's history (October 6) [content note: police brutality] "The settlement is not an admission of liability, the court documents show."

12. Angela Lansbury, 'Murder, She Wrote' and 'Beauty and the Beast' star, dies at 96 (October 12) 

13. How SEO Is Gentrifying the Internet (2020) "'Can Cats Eat Blueberries?' was a masterpiece by SEO writing standards and an absolute turd by regular writing standards. A reader might spend five minutes reading the article and still have no idea if it’s OK to roll one (1) blueberry across the floor for their floofy pouncemonster to chase. However, as long as the reader spends those five minutes looking at the page—and more importantly, the ads that are placed on it—then mission accomplished. This is where the SEOification of the internet has brought us, and it [****]ing sucks."

14. Sex Work and the Power of Choice (2011) "When you think about this for ten seconds, you should realize that it makes no sense. People in any other service profession can, and do, turn down customers they don’t want to work with."

15. Sex-Positivity, Compulsory Sexuality and Intersecting Identities (2012) "There are too many issues of power and privilege at play which are not adequately challenged and criticised. The institution of compulsory sexuality still underpins sex-positivism."

16. that female athlete doesn’t look feminine enough (August 18) "Girls looking insufficiently feminine is now a complaint that the government takes 'seriously', and that the government then investigates."

17. The City of Philadelphia Apologizes for Decades of Medical Experiments Performed on Black Inmates (October 11) "From 1951 through 1974, Dr. Albert Kligman, a dermatologist from the University of Pennsylvania, conducted 'the dermatological, biochemical and pharmaceutical experiments that intentionally exposed about 300 inmates to viruses, fungus, asbestos and chemical agents including dioxin—a component of Agent Orange.'" And the article goes on to describe experiments even more disturbing than that. WTF????

18. Epidural-Induced Births ‘Far Behind’ in China, Says Top Expert (October 12) "Mi Weidong, an anesthesiologist at the country’s top health authority leading the taskforce in promoting epidural anesthesia, said that only 30% of female respondents in a nationwide survey were offered anesthetic services during childbirth, despite a large majority of them opting for a more painfree delivery method."

19. (Chill) Ex-Ace Narrative 1: Validation (August 14) "Amidst this chorus of voices, ace communities were the only ones to consistently say 'The subjective experiences you're having are real and okay-- even if they're non-normative and statistically uncommon. You can articulate your own relationship to sex and sexuality on your own terms. You don't need to change your behaviors/desires/attitudes to more normative ones for the sake of fitting a relationship or an ideological ideal. You don't have to organize your life around the expectation that you're someday have a more normative relationship to sexuality.'"

Blogaround

1. How do you live in one of the world's busiest cities, but you cannot see? (August 11) It's about Yin Tianbao and Yin Tianyou, blind twins living in Shanghai. One interesting thing I want to point out- the article mentioned "tactile paving" (and you can see it in the video too). Every sidewalk in China (okay probably not "every", but seems that way in my experience) has this- it's a path of tiles about 1 foot wide, with long bumps/grooves you can feel with your feet, and the intention is for blind people to be able to follow this path. It helps them figure out where the sidewalk turns and things like that. 

But I have seen this badly designed A LOT. Like, the path runs right into a tree or something. And the article mentions that the tactile paving is often not useful for them because the sidewalks are blocked with bicycles and things like that.

But anyway, I think the tactile paving, if it's done well, is a great example of a small thing that society can do that can help disabled people a lot. I remember being so curious about it when I first came to China and I had no idea why all the sidewalks were like that.

You can see the tactile paving on the ground in this photo in a subway station. At the base of the stairs, the pattern of the tactile paving is different.

2. Single women's reproductive rights remain frozen in regulations (August 11) So in China, unmarried women don't legally have the right to freeze their eggs. Like, WTF?????? And there are various other things in China that bizarrely require a marriage license as part of the process to get them. NOT COOL.

(Being pro-choice should be about a lot more than just abortion. Being pro-choice means unmarried women should have the same rights to freeze their eggs as married women do.)

3. Christians, Stop Using ‘Pharisee’ as an Insult. (August 11) "Our modern associations of Pharisees with hypocrisy owes far more to millennia of anti-Jewish rhetoric than it does to Jesus."

4. ‘It’s hard to hear them celebrating’—church musicians after Roe’s demise (August 6) "Is anyone else having a really hard time justifying working at a church right now? I work at one part time as a choir director for some additional income and it was really hard to sit there today and hear them celebrating my rights being taken away with the most recent Supreme Court ruling."

5. A Texas church illegally performed ‘Hamilton’ to spread anti-gay bigotry (August 6) Wow this is WILD. A church put on a whole production of "Hamilton"- like, wow, they must have put a lot of work into this- but with some parts slightly edited so it's about Hamilton finding Jesus or whatever. And then when the internet found out about it and people were mad, they made up some confusing lies about how oh we cancelled it, oh no actually we didn't, oh actually we have permission from the Hamilton team to put this show on, etc etc etc.

But I believe that the headline of this article- which says the church did it "to spread anti-gay bigotry" really misrepresents the situation. It seems that the only anti-gay part of it was, after the show was over, a pastor came on stage to talk to the audience and said "maybe you're struggling with homosexuality" along with a list of other things that one might be "struggling with." As far as I can tell, that was the only anti-gay part of it. And that's certainly bad, don't get me wrong, it's bad to view being gay as a problem that one struggles with- but that's just a completely normal thing that you always hear in evangelical churches. It's like, you barely even notice it, because it's so normal in that churchy culture. This church did NOT put on the Hamilton play "to spread anti-gay bigotry." They certainly are anti-gay bigots, and you see that in this pastor's words after the show, but it's because that's just who they are all the time, not because they specifically intended that that's what their performance would be *about*.

So yeah, feels very weird to me that the article focuses on that one little part, when there's so much other wrongness that this church is also doing.

6. How I Pray {Part One} (August 10) "In my view, when we pray, we are joining our energy with this flow." I don't personally believe this, but I'm sharing it here because it's nice to see different ways that Christians conceptualize prayer. I wasn't familiar with this idea before.

7. Take the Earth as your lover: Exploring ecosexuality (August 8) [content note: this is about a sexual kink] Yeah so, this is not for me, my eyebrows climbed higher and higher as I read it (as I told myself "your kink is not my kink, but your kink is okay"). But I'm sharing it here because it actually gives very concrete examples of what it means by "ecosexuality." I feel like I have seen articles about things sort of like this and they are all very vague, talking about having "feeling sexy" or whatever, and I have no idea what that means. But this one, this actually says what it means. It's not for me, but I am glad to say I can at least understand what they're talking about.

Blogaround

A cat tree that's green and shaped like a Christmas tree, with 3 cats enjoying it. Image source.

1. How Blind People See With Sound… feat. Molly Burke! (posted August 10) Wow this is amazing! People can learn to use echolocation to map their environment. I thought only bats could do that.

2. Do Kids Really Learn Languages Faster Than Adults? (posted November 29) "This all adds up to not just the perception but the reality that adults who attempt to learn new languages often fail while their kids succeed, despite studies showing conclusively that adults are actually better at learning new languages when they actually put the effort in."

Highly recommend this video. I am fluent in Mandarin Chinese, which I started studying when I was about 20. At the beginning I genuinely believed that perhaps no matter how hard I worked, I might never be able to speak Chinese, because I had always heard white Americans talking about "I tried to learn a new language, but I guess my brain just can't" or "if you're not exposed to it as a baby, you can never ever learn to understand it." That's total nonsense.

Yes, learning a language is hard. It requires a lot of time and effort. You need to practice speaking, and that means you need to accept that you're going to make mistakes, and just learn to laugh at yourself rather than be too scared to try.

Because it's so hard, I completely understand if you choose not to do it. That's totally fine. People who speak multiple languages aren't superior; people who speak 1 language shouldn't feel ashamed. But I want people to accept the reality that the reason they only speak 1 language is because they have other, higher-priority things going on in their lives, and therefore they don't spend time on studying, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Don't go around spreading myths like "my brain just can't" and discourage those of us who really want to learn a second language.

3. ICE arrests 90 more students at fake university in Michigan (posted November 27) What on earth? The Department of Homeland Security made a fake university and then arrested the international students who came? For real?

4. 'Star Wars' Billy Dee Williams Uses Both Male and Female Pronouns (posted November 30) Cool~

How About We Let Disabled People Tell Us What to Think About Jesus' Healings

Blind man walking with a cane and dog.

Let's look at Matthew 20:29-34. In this story, two blind men call out to Jesus and ask him to give them their sight, and he does.

In my experience, when Christians read biblical accounts of Jesus' healings, we discuss and interpret them from a certain set of assumptions about disabilities. These are assumptions which seem, to abled people, to be so obviously true, we never even question them or realize it's possible to think in a different way. Specifically, I'm talking about beliefs like:

1. The #1 thing a disabled person needs most is to become not-disabled.
2. After Jesus heals them, everything is good, and they can immediately go ahead and "be a normal person."

However, I have now learned that society's beliefs about disabled people are often wrong and harmful. In particular, many disabled writers talk about how they want people to listen to them instead of spreading ignorant stereotypes, and they want society to be accessible so disabled people are not barred from participating in everyday activities that abled people take for granted. They say that it's not the disability that limits them, it's people's stereotypes and ignorance and how society is basically designed with the assumption that disabled people don't exist or aren't important. To imagine that they just need to be "healed" and then everything would be better just perpetuates the idea that there's nothing wrong with society and it's totally fine that we constantly exclude disabled people.

In my own case, loud sounds are painful for me (because of sensory reasons related to autism). If Jesus "healed" me so loud sounds weren't painful, that would be great, but it also wouldn't mean the whole loud-sounds problem is solved and done and it's all good. I have an entire lifetime of experience of people not taking me seriously when I was upset by a sound, people laughing at me, people saying my pain isn't real and "it's not that bad." I have all this emotional trauma that I'm working through now, trying to make sense of my childhood and what was really going on all those times adults told me to "be brave" and stop being so "sensitive"- and it takes years. (Blogging is cheaper than therapy...)

It would be just THE WORST if Jesus "healed" me and then other people thought, "ugh FINALLY she got over it and quit complaining"- as if my "healing" justified all the times that they wished I would just shut up and act normal. Like they did nothing wrong, all their attempts to shove a square peg in a round hole, because I finally became a round peg and gained the ability to act like they always wanted me to act. Why does "healing" mean a person becomes not-disabled, rather than abled people learning how to stop excluding and stereotyping disabled people?

So anyway, my point is, when I read this story about Jesus healing two blind men, I wanted to know what blind people think about it. And in general, what do disabled people think about Jesus' healings in the bible? I've gathered some articles here, and I would like to know if my readers have any other good resources about it or book recommendations.

Here are the links I've found:

Out of the Darkness: Examining the Rhetoric of Blindness in the Gospel of John

[In the gospel of John, p]hysical blindness may provide the necessary ground for faith to grow and emerge, but the person cannot remain physically blind. There are biblical scholars and disability activists alike who note that there are no blind disciples. Grant (Eiesland & Saliers, eds., 1998) writes, for example, "It is true that at one level the healing stories are stories of inclusion in that Jesus heals and welcomes all sorts of people into God's reign. However, the very fact that they are physically healed by Jesus suggests that physical restoration is a necessary component of their entry into the community" (p. 77). Grant also cites Donald Senior, Frederick Tiffany, and Sharon Ringe, all who have made similar points. From her perspective working with people with disabilities and government agencies in Australia, Elizabeth Hastings writes:

...with all the respect due to the ten lepers, the various possessed, and the sundry blind, lame, and deaf faithful of scripture, I reckon people who have disabilities may have been better off for the last two thousand years if Our Lord had not created quite so many miraculous cures but occasionally said, "your life is perfect as it is given to you – go ye and find its purpose and meaning," and to onlookers, "this disability is an ordinary part of human being, go ye and create the miracle of a world free of discrimination" (quoted in Calder, 2004, p. 12).

John Hull (2001) in his recent reflection on reading the Bible from his own blind perspective tries to conceive of blind men and women following Jesus through the Galilee—he cannot. Blind disciples would have been an affront to Jesus' power.

Although physical infirmity is not connected to sin in the example of the man born blind, it is, in this case, connected to ignorance of truth. In John 9, the physical condition of blindness always also connotes metaphorical blindness as a mental or spiritual condition, or ignorance. Both the literal and metaphorical meanings of blindness are always present every time the words "blind" and "to see" are used in the story. The literal and metaphorical meanings of blindness have the potential of contaminating each other in any context. There is a danger of at least implicitly, if not explicitly, associating physically blind people with mental and spiritual incapacity, and associating Jewish people, whether blind or not, with the same shortcomings.

In Search of a More Robust Theology of Disability

The idea that sight=good and blind=bad is so deeply ingrained in our culture that most of us are not even aware of its existence. I can't begin to cover all of the ways that this idea manifests itself, from sighted people giving pity to finding inspiration in how we "cope" with our "suffering" to fearing us, to assuming we have substandard lives, to fervently thanking God they are not us, to rushing up to us on the street and laying hands on us to receive healing, when we are trying to run to the grocery store before an appointment. We are constantly told in numerous subtle ways that we are "broken" or "damaged" and then in the same breath told that we are "brave" and "inspirational" when in reality to us it feels about as important as being tall or short. It is merely a physical attribute and life goes on. For a blind person, being able or willing to return the gaze of a sighted person is not an accurate measure of his dignity or self-worth. By the same token, to the blind person, the sighted person he is talking to seems undignified as a result of the noxious body odor or the grating, gravelly voice and repulsive manner of speaking even though he is meeting the other's gaze. I realize the above was used metaphorically, and thus am I also using it. Consider the actual source of dignity!

The disclaimer that "real blind people don't count" doesn't hold any water at all, because to talk about an attribute of our lives is to talk about us. You cannot propose a theology of dark skin without involving people who have dark skin, or a theology of Asian people without involving people who live in or come from Asia. You cannot talk about how God treats women in the abstract without it affecting real women and how people think about us and treat us and the ways we as people empower or disempower other people to live as Christians, or how apt we are to reject Christianity because it simply does not work as a realistic worldview.

An example of this is a discussion I read recently on social media between a group of mixed blind non-Christians and blind Christians who have experienced sighted Christians approaching them on the street and asking to lay hands on them so that Jesus can heal their blindness. The non-Christians in particular were incredibly repulsed by this experience, which unfortunately stems directly from the theology as put forth in the quoted post above.

Biblically, blind people are beggars, like Blind Bartimaeus, who come to Jesus asking to be healed, to be redeemed, to be given social standing and allowed re-entry into society. Blind people in ancient times were cursed; there is no denying that. They could not navigate or work at meaningful labor. They could not participate in civil government and were hardly better than lepers.

In third-world countries, blindness is the same today. Blind people are not offered an education and usually do not marry or have children. They are taught menial tasks such as basket weaving and are often a lifelong burden on their families or communities. They are poor, pitiful, in short, everything we assume blindness to be. My daughter, adopted from Ethiopia was "rescued" (cringe) from just such a life.

Contrast this with a blind person living in the Western developed world. Here, a blind person in ideal circumstances is taught to read and write using alternative methods. This blind person (we'll use the male pronoun for convenience and brevity) is taught to navigate using a white cane or guide dog (for example), and is allowed access to all public facilities and places of business. He can travel anywhere he wants to go by himself, and can hold a job is nearly any field. He can work meaningfully, marry and support a family, have hobbies, own and maintain a house, contribute to society, have honest dealings with other members of society and have a comparable quality of life to a person with perfect sight.

‘Lord I was deaf’. Images of Disability in the Hymnbooks

Before we began to refer to the metaphor of sight and blindness we had arrived at a discriminating criterion. This was to ask ourselves if the metaphor suggested a disparaging comparison with groups of disabled people. I would now like to suggest a more searching rationale for this. If sighted and hearing people use the imagery of light and sound to express their experiences in the world they inhabit that is natural and inevitable. However, if able bodied people make disparaging allusions to people who have very different experiences this may not only betray ignorance of those ways of life and is discourteous, but may reinforce a prejudice against disabled people that will in turn give credibility to the view that Christian faith does not offer answers to the search for equal opportunities: it may actually be part of the problem. In other words, when we consider the sliding scale of metaphors from those that refer explicitly to various impaired states through to those which merely use the various ideas of light and sound, sight and speech, we should distinguish between those that speak to our own world, the one we know and experience, and those that refer negatively to other peoples worlds of which we have no first-hand experience.

In saying this, I do not overlook the fact that there may be hymn writers who are themselves blind yet continue to use disparaging metaphors of their own condition. This is to be explained by the combination of a piety which does not adopt a critical stance towards the tradition, and immersion in the assumptions of a society in which the inferiority and the marginalisation of disabled people were simply taken for granted.

In the light of our new principle it is possible to comment on the situation of people with other impairments such as those who use wheelchairs for mobility. Biblical precedent such as the eschatological hope expressed in Isaiah 35.5 and some of the miracles in the gospels do encourage the hymn writers to refer to lame people. Lameness can be used as a disparaging metaphor for sin. Such expressions are as unacceptable as the explicitly pejorative references to blind and deaf people. Merely referring to standing up, however, comes into the category of speaking of the body’s symbolism which is natural to those who have legs and can use them. A wheelchair user should no more object to ‘stand up and bless the Lord, ye people of His choice’ than I as a blind person have any right to object to ‘the Lord is my light, my strength and my salvation’. True, the Lord is not my light, because I have no light sensation, and wheelchair users cannot respond to the invitation to stand up in the presence of the Lord. However, just as able bodied people should not thrust the demands of their experience upon others, so people with impairments should not demand that able-bodied worlds should conform to theirs. The principle is to rejoice in your own world without making disparaging remarks or setting unreasonable limits upon the natural life-worlds of others.

A limited range of disabilities are referred to in the hymnbooks. These are usually those that find a symbolic place within the vocabulary of the bible: blindness, deafness, being lame or having leprosy. We referred earlier to the hymn ‘Thine arm O, Lord in days of old’, quoting the line ‘the beggar with his sightless eyes’. This replaced the line, found in the older version, ‘the leper with his tainted life’ which has not reappeared in that particular hymn since about 1950. References to diseases such as AIDS and cancer are rarely if ever found in hymns, partly because they are contemporary conditions, and partly because they are not referred to in the bible.

Disability Theology

The most powerful discussion of God to arise from within disability studies comes from Nancy Eiesland's proposal of the Disabled God, in the book by the same title (Eiesland, 1994). Eiesland identifies herself as "a woman with disabilities, a sociologist of religion, and a professor at a seminary in the United States" (Eiesland, 1998a, p. 103). These three elements come together in her theology, which centers on what she calls "the mixed blessing of the body," especially as these relate to the lived experience of disability. From her sociological perspective, she is especially interested in theories and methods that empower and provide a foundation for political action. She uses the image of the Disabled God to support such political action, particularly through processes of resymbolization. She is also interested in deconstructing notions of normalcy. She writes: "My own body composed as it is of metal and plastic, as well as bone and flesh, is my starting point for talking about 'bones and braces bodies' as a norm of embodiment" (Eiesland, 1994, p. 22). Her proposal is a model of God that makes sense of her "normal" experience of embodiment, as well as one that supports and participates in the struggle for liberation of all people with disabilities.
Eiesland argues that traditional images of God, especially those that lead to views of disability as either a blessing or a curse, are inadequate. Within her own experience, she wondered whether such a God could even understand disability, let alone be meaningful to her. While working at a rehabilitation hospital, she asked the residents one day what they thought.
After a long silence, a young African-American man said, "If God was in a sip-puff, maybe He would understand." I was overwhelmed by this image: God in a sip-puff wheelchair, the kind used by many quadriplegics that enables them to maneuver the chair by blowing and sucking on a straw-like device. Not an omnipotent, self-sufficient God, but neither a pitiable, suffering servant. This was an image of God as a survivor, as one of those whom society would label "not feasible," "unemployable," with "questionable quality of life" (Eiesland, 2002, p. 13).

Eiesland made a connection between this image and the resurrection story in which Jesus appears to his followers and reveals his injured hands and feet (Luke 24:36-39). She notes "This wasn't exactly God in a sip-puff, but here was the resurrected Christ making good on the promise that God would be with us, embodied, as we are — disabled and divine. In this passage, I recognized a part of my hidden history as a Christian" (Eiesland, 2002, p. 14). Eiesland suggests that Jesus reveals the Disabled God, and shows that divinity (as well as humanity) is fully compatible with experiences of disability. The imago Dei includes pierced hands and feet and side. According to Eiesland, this Disabled God is part of the "hidden history" of Christianity, because seldom is the resurrected Christ recognized as a deity whose hands, feet, and side bear the marks of profound physical impairment. As Rebecca Chopp notes in the introduction to this work, "The most astonishing fact is, of course, that Christians do not have an able-bodied God as their primal image. Rather, the Disabled God promising grace through a broken body is at the center of piety, prayer, practice, and mission" (Eiesland, 1994, p. 11).

Strength in Weakness: The Bible, Disability, and the Church

From an able-bodied reading of the Bible, it is easy to assume God wants to heal every person with a disability. In the New Testament, every person who encounters Jesus blind, deaf, or lame is restored to health. But theologian Amos Yong wants the church to read the Bible differently, seeing good news for people with disabilities as they are, and not as God might change them.

Crooked Healing: Disability, Vocation and the Theology of the Cross

There are few things more potentially useful to the disabled experience than the idea of vocation. Vocation places disability in a wider spectrum of the sacred calling. It implies that disabled people and their able-bodied counterparts are on equal spiritual footing. More than that, it suggests that disabled people can be seen as conduits for God’s grace and service rather than it only images of a broken creation in need of “fixing.”

Christians who aren't disabled have a much too simplistic view of Jesus' healings in the bible. And even the biblical authors had some of the same prejudices, equating disability with sin or portraying it as incompatible with following Jesus. Just because the bible has a certain view doesn't mean it's right- it could be ableist (or anti-Semitic, or sexist, etc). We need to learn about disability by listening to actual disabled people.

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This post is part of a series on the gospel of Matthew.

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