Hans Reinders

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  Paradox Of Disability

  $24.99

  The village of Trosly-Breuil in northern France is home to one of the world’s thirty-four L’Arche communities, where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together. In 2007 an impressive assortment of social scientists and theologians gathered there to offer responses to a question posed by the worldwide community’s cofounder, Jean Vanier: “What have people with disabilities taught me?” Their answers are here presented in a diverse collection of essays.

  Editor Hans Reinders emphasizes that these analyses and reflections – like the L’Arche communities that inspired them – are not meant to set apart those with disabilities. Rather, they encourage people of all abilities humbly to acknowledge that to be human is to live with brokenness and limitation – and that to experience true community we must first learn to receive other people as God’s gift.

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  Receiving The Gift Of Friendship

  $41.99

  Is the point of human life what we are capable of doing? Is that what defines us as human beings? And if this basic anthropological assumption is true, where can that leave those with intellectual disabilities, unable to accomplish the things that we propose give us our very humanity? Hans Reinders here makes an unusual claim about unusual people: those who are profoundly disabled are people just like the rest of us. He acknowledges that, at first glance, this is not an unusual claim given the steps taken within the last few decades to bring the rights of those with disabilities into line with the rights of the mainstream. But, he argues, that cannot be the end of the matter, because the disabled are human beings before they are citizens. “To live a human life properly,” he says, “they must not only be included in our institutions and have access to our public spaces; they must also be included in other people’s lives, not just by natural necessity but by choice.” Overturning the “commonsense” view of human beings, Reinders’s argument for a paradigm shift in our relation to people with disabilities is founded on a groundbreaking philosophical-theological consideration of humanity and of our basic human commonality.

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