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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Annelie Geissler
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Religion & beliefs

LOVING YOUR OWN BONES

Julia Watts Belser

Disability Wisdom and the Stiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole

A transformative spiritual companion and deep dive into disability politics that reimagines disability in the Bible and contemporary culture. An essential read that will foster and enrich conversations about disability, spirituality, and social justice.

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 believes he is unable to answer God's call. Isaac's blindness lets his wife trick him into bestowing his blessing on his younger son. Jesus heals the sick, the blind, the paralyzed, and the possessed. For centuries, these stories have been retold by religious leaders and cultural 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. A scholar, an activist, a rabbi, and a fearless writer, Belser delves deeply into sacred literature, braiding the insights of disabled, feminist, Black, and queer thinkers alongside her own experiences as a queer disabled Jewish feminist to gift us with a radical act of spiritual imagination. Her fresh readings of familiar biblical stories demonstrate how disability wisdom can guide us all toward a powerful reckoning with the complexities of the flesh. She challenges biblical commentators who traffic in disability stigma and shame, pushing back against interpretations that demean disabled people and diminish the vitality of disabled lives. And she shows how Sabbath rest can be a powerful counter to the relentless demand for productivity, an act of spiritual resistance in a culture that makes work the signal measure of our worth. LOVING OUR OWN BONES is a transformative bookone that shows how disability can kindle the kind of embodied knowledge, ethical dissent, creativity, and spiritual insight our world so desperately needs. Julia Watts Belser is a rabbi, scholar, and spiritual teacher who writes about disability, queer Jewish feminism, and environmental justice. She's an associate professor of Jewish Studies at Georgetown University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. She is the author of several scholarly books, most recently Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, And Disability in The Ruins of Jerusalem. A longtime activist for disability and gender justice, she's also a passionate wheelchair hiker and a lover of wild places. http://www.juliawattsbelser.com

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Book Published 2023-09-12 by Beacon Press

Comments

A necessary and fervent invitation to dream a new world into existence, one that celebrates disability wisdom and radical love. Julia Watts Belser's powerful spiritual insights offer hope that we can create such a vibrant world together.

UK: Hodder

A triumph of theological insight, disability activism, and honest, personal, hard-won wisdom... Her skill in engaging these passages is a superb example of how to draw spiritual direction from within a religious tradition, while asking hard questions and refusing to accept when power is wielded, consciously or unconsciously, against marginalized communities... An excellent, impressive addition to the conversation around theology and disability that shines on many levels.

This is an extraordinary book: beautifully written and accessible yet filled with scholarly insights; profoundly spiritual yet also boldly critical; fiercely angry yet also affirming and joyous. Readers of LOVING OUR OWN BONES will not only come away with a deepened understanding of disability and ableism but will also likely have their views of many biblical texts challenged and transformed.

This book reaches back to the oldest stories of the Hebrew Bible and retells them through perspectives on flourishing in bodies considered disabled - the kinds of bodies we all inevitably inhabit. LOVING OUR OWN BONES is a gift to us all and a call to love ourselves and one another in all our varied, distinctive, and entirely human bodies.

Written with a scholar's deft touch and a poet's lyrical precision, this book will draw you in to think and feel differently about sacred texts and disabled people's complex and luminous lives, in the troublesome context of ableism's strictures and structures. By the end, I was transported to new vistas, unimagined openings in my heart and understanding. Julia Watts Belser's ability to move differently carries the reader to new realms: LOVING OUR OWN BONES is a book that flies on wheels, a dazzling and revelatory ride.

An unapologetically embodied text, LOVING OUR OWN BONES is essential reading for anyone interested in queer crip world-making. Seamlessly weaving together memoir, disability theory, biblical criticism, and activist practice, Julia Watts Belser offers readers vital new frameworks for understanding the textures of disabled life and the possibilities of story. Placing radically inclusive access at the center of her spiritual work, Belser reveals how loving our own bones is a collective act.

Julia Watts Belser is a Wisdom Rebbe, a leader, an innovator, and a sacred guide to the deepest depths of all that makes us human.

Belser, a professor of Jewish Studies at Georgetown University, delivers a rigorous and broad-minded analysis of disability in the Bible, bringing 'critical testimony from disability communities' into conversation with 'more conventional sources of Jewish wisdom.'... This is an impressive achievement.