I love unexpected connections. In Andrew McKendry's Disavowing Disability: Richard Baxter and the Conditions of Salvation, a new work on disability, Calvinism, and seventeenth-century theology in the Cambridge Elements series, I found so much to love. McKendry's smart, savvy, and surprisingly urgent exploration of the theological workings of salvation (“soteriology”) teaches readers how Richard Baxter's theology illuminates ongoing crises in exclusionary thinking baked into liberalism and liberal personhood. McKendry maintains, “While today fateful discussions about disability happen in policy documents, scientific journals, court decisions, and social media channels, in the early Enlightenment much of this discursive negotiation occurred in sermons, theological tracts, and moral guidebooks” (3). Disability becomes a way to contest, shape, and delineate the politics of inclusion in liberal personhood, and Baxter's soteriological frameworks expose the ways violent inequities get folded in through religious discourse and practice.
In short, Disavowing Disability successfully tells the story of how...
