“…Underpinning the generally negative views of disabled people in Ghana was the widely held belief that everything had a spiritual cause. The continued centrality of faith and belief in spiritual causation means that to be accepted as valid by most Ghanaians, models of disability need to include a spiritual element that includes both the perceived causes of disability and how to respond to it (Abraham and Odoom, 2019: p. 69).…”
Though African‐led engagement with persons with disabilities (PWDs) within varying African churches has been an ongoing project since the 1990s, recent developments in the study of PWDs remain notably absent from mainstream African, religious, or disabilities studies. Calling attention to the interrelation between these three important scholarly fields can help scholars and PWDs alike to conceptualize of the treatment of PWDs in Africa and, more specifically, their role in the Christian Church on the continent. Focusing on the theological and ecclesiological solutions to the ongoing oppression and segregation of African PWDs, this article therefore seeks to define the lived experiences and scholarship that sit at the intersection of these three important scholarly fields. In doing so, this article seeks to aid in the development of a better understanding of how PWDs in variable African churches are understood and how novel African scholarship aims to define or modify this understanding.
“…Underpinning the generally negative views of disabled people in Ghana was the widely held belief that everything had a spiritual cause. The continued centrality of faith and belief in spiritual causation means that to be accepted as valid by most Ghanaians, models of disability need to include a spiritual element that includes both the perceived causes of disability and how to respond to it (Abraham and Odoom, 2019: p. 69).…”
Though African‐led engagement with persons with disabilities (PWDs) within varying African churches has been an ongoing project since the 1990s, recent developments in the study of PWDs remain notably absent from mainstream African, religious, or disabilities studies. Calling attention to the interrelation between these three important scholarly fields can help scholars and PWDs alike to conceptualize of the treatment of PWDs in Africa and, more specifically, their role in the Christian Church on the continent. Focusing on the theological and ecclesiological solutions to the ongoing oppression and segregation of African PWDs, this article therefore seeks to define the lived experiences and scholarship that sit at the intersection of these three important scholarly fields. In doing so, this article seeks to aid in the development of a better understanding of how PWDs in variable African churches are understood and how novel African scholarship aims to define or modify this understanding.
Using an interdisciplinary approach combining folkloristics and disability studies, I argue that a specific category of nineteenth-century Icelandic ghost stories reflects a sociocultural process of re-defining human individuals with intellectual disabilities as supernatural beings. The legends depicting this process of re-fitting are revealed as narratives offering culture-specific guiding principles for understanding and engaging with people with intellectual disabilities. As ghosts, disruptive and challenging human misfits could be accepted as “normal” supernatural beings.
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