Darla Schumm’s Healing Ableism: Stories About Disability and Religious Life is a clarion call for disability justice, directing attention to the ableist discrimination that too frequently goes unnoticed in religious community life and inviting readers to join in the long-overdue disruption of the ableist status quo. Drawing on the author’s personal experience in Mennonite and Episcopalian spaces, on interviews with clergy and lay practitioners from various Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist perspectives, and on her own scholarship on disability and the world’s religions, Healing Ableism approaches the topic with breadth by noticing patterns within the lives and stories of ordinary disabled people.
In the opening chapter, Schumm positions herself as someone who became disabled in childhood, grounding her analysis in the lived disability experience that is still too frequently lacking from scholars working at the intersection of disability and religion. Acknowledging how she only recently came to terms with disability as an identity, Schumm masterfully posits an alternative vision for life within and between religious institutions—one in which disabled bodies are not problems to be solved because the real brokenness in need of healing is ableism. Viewing ableism as a justice issue, Schumm powerfully integrates theory, candid interviews with other disabled people, and cultural critiques of pervasive body hierarchies in the United States to call on religious leaders and lay believers to participate in the transformative justice disabled people deserve.
With precision and a clear commitment to accessible writing, Schumm rages against ableism, arguing that the work of justice requires religious communities to embrace the transformative power of rage so that we can, together, create environments of tangible inclusion and accessible love. Healing Ableism calls out the pervasive power of ableism, delving into how religious practices, theologies, and communities reinforce the purported unquestionability of ableist frameworks.
Noticing how definitions of disability tend to skew negative and fundamentally depend on the proximity one has to disabled life, chapter 2 embraces this ambiguity by acknowledging that there is no singular universal definition of disability. Insisting otherwise would reduce disability to a one-dimensional experience and would cause additional harm. By providing a brief background of the medical, social, political/relational, and religious models of disability, Schumm situates her readers in the conversations of her field without jargon or presupposition of what readers may not know while still successfully resisting the tendency of scholars to collapse difference through their models. Schumm criticizes simplistic models of disability, inviting religious practitioners to rage against ableism and work towards disability justice by connecting a more complex political/relational model with disability-affirming religious models.
As the book progresses, Schumm teases out key tensions people with disabilities face when navigating ableist systems and personal assumptions, notably the religious classifications of disabled people as either sinners or saints, where religious communities must come to understand that “providing saintly inspiration is as exhausting as being cast as a hopeless sinner” (34). Chapter 3 makes clear that ableism is embedded just as deeply in conceptions of the “supercrip,” who is asked to function as a moral exemplar, as in presumptions of moral failure where people are deemed individually responsible for their disabilities. While highly beneficial for the necessary work of dismantling religious ableism, Schumm’s argument is less convincing when she deploys it toward exegetical work. While she acknowledges that she is neither a biblical scholar nor a preacher and rightly criticizes narratives of eradication of disability in sacred texts, Schumm fails to notice the difference between healing and cure and neglects to discuss the relationality at work in the healing ministry of Jesus.
Schumm writes with attention to power, privilege, and the nuanced, sometimes contradictory texture of disabled life. Building on postcolonial, feminist, and queer theories, she calls out ableism’s discursive power to define, measure, and maintain the able-bodied status quo. Analyzing the power of the norm and religious communities’ desire for “normalcy,” Schumm artfully illustrates in chapter 4 how religious communities refuse to tolerate bodies that fail to conform to their expectations and regularly make “abundantly clear that anyone who was unable to participate fully in religious rituals in the prescribed way would remain on the periphery of the community or would be pushed out altogether” (71). Here, Schumm identifies the staying power of religious ableism: religious communities are so entrenched in bodily hierarchies that they often do not notice when their desire for control casts out the very people whom their religious values call them to care most deeply about.
To further her discussion of the hegemonic norm and compulsory able-bodiedness within communities of faith, Schumm extrapolates a series of so-called “crip tests” in chapter 5 where disabled people are welcomed in religious life as (1) “inspiration porn” for able-bodied people who are grateful not to have it worse; (2) bodies deficient in faith against whom prayers can be weaponized; and (3) blank canvases upon which God can display divine power. Rather than perpetuating these ableist stereotypes, religious communities can choose to come alongside disabled people, dismantling ableism by asking how people with disabilities can best be welcomed and prioritizing a future of disability justice. The last two chapters of Healing Ableism function as a final plea for religious communities to rage against ableism, centering access, inclusion, and justice in the present moment rather than attempting to pray disabled people out of their preferred futures.
Schumm has developed her argument for disabled people, religious practitioners, and society at large, recognizing that anyone can become disabled at any time and rightly insisting that ableism harms everyone, especially when it is left out of conversations about dismantling intersecting oppressions. All people—but especially nondisabled religious leaders who profess a commitment to justice, yet who do not know how to begin—should accept this invitation to accessible love, transformative disability justice, and communal healing of religious ableism.
Angela Molloy is a PhD student studying disability theology and moral injury in the University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology Joint Doctoral Program in Religion.
Angela Molloy
Date Of Review:
April 25, 2026
