Wondrously Wounded

Brian Brock shows us how 'wonder' better describes the disabled than 'the disabled.' More precisely, he shows us how shared life with the disabled naturally enjoins us to wonder. Despite our contemporary culture's inability to receive the world as gift, God won't give up on us. The fact that Brock makes this argument by marshaling theological resources in order to tell the beautiful story of his son Adam tells everything you need to know about the courage, insight and power of Wondrously Wounded.

~Jonathan Tran, Associate Professor of Philosophical Theology and George W. Baines Chair of Religion, Baylor University

This is a powerful book. Situated by his experience as a parent of a child with disabilities and drawing from a wide-ranging engagement with Christian traditions, Brock’s analysis offers rich theological and ethical insights that cultivate fertile new ground for reimagining disability outside modern frames of normalcy. The book is sure to become a standard reference in the field. But more, it should be read by all those studying Christian theology and ethics, and learning to live and wonder as members of one another in the Body of Christ.

~Thomas E. Reynolds, Vice-Principal and Associate Professor of Theology, University of Toronto

…This book is a wonder. Filled with insight, passion, and love, it calls us to open our eyes and find God at work through the Holy Spirit in each member of Christ’s body.

~Aaron Klink, The Christian Century

The strengths of Wondrously Wounded are legion....With hope he calls the church to a far deeper and more challenging vocation, seeing it as a traiing ground for eliminating modernity’s exclusionary categories that the church too often capitulates to.

~Jason Reimer Greig, The Conrad Grebel Review

There is much to be gained from reading Brock’s well‐researched book, as it deftly combines familiar questions and themes in theology and disability with new insights and surprising emphases. Above all, the author loves rigorous theological argument and analysis, as is displayed by his abundant and frequently rich notes.

~Hans S. Reinders, Modern Theology

Brock is speaking with confidence about the paradoxes in modern medical thought and practice and about the uneasy way in which modern Christians have adopted secular consumeristic assumptions. His is a powerful call to arms: to resist the social and cultural structures that induce us to distance ourselves from other and to accept the powerful command of the spirit to receive and embrace others. All of this he grounds in a richly developed incarnational theology of the flesh that is practically brought to bear upon the practices of societies and communities that should know better.

~Candida Moss, Scottish Journal of Theology

... Wondrously Wounded is an impressive achievement. Within it, Brock engages a wide range of voices from ancient, medieval, reformational, and modern theologians to medical ethicists and disability researchers. It would benefit not only theologians who are already invested in theological reflection upon disability, but those interested in theological anthropology, medical ethics, and ecclesiology.

~Shaun C. Brown, Reading Religion

… the comprehensive and multi-disciplinary nature of this volume builds it into a robust, thoroughly considered, paradigm-shattering view of disability. A magnum opus in its own right, each part could be easily and rightfully expanded into its own publication… It’s theology, it’s ethics, it’s ethnography--there’s not a page in Wondrously Wounded that fails to challenge, provoke, or inform.

~Josh Olds, Life is Story

In this stunning contribution to the expanding repository of disability theology, the author challenges us to abandon such notions of spiritual hierarchy and allow ourselves to be trans-formed by the Spirit-given oneness with and gifts of every member of the body

~Jill Harshaw, Modern Believing