Peter Capretto

Informed by debates on the reductionism of defining disciplinary concepts in disability studies and religion, this article argues that theology faces a unique ethical and methodological challenge in whether to operationalize experiences with disability into anything theologically significant or useful. Analyzing how some scholarship in disability theology has problematically appropriated disability even for liberatory purposes, it contends that theology struggles methodologically to distinguish itself from ideological rhetoric that deliberately marginalizes persons with disability. However, rejecting operationalization not only threatens the collaboration between theology and the social sciences afforded by operationalizing shared inquiries, but risks suggesting that disability is not worthy of sustained theological attention. The article proposes that this double-bind forces theology to critique operationalization by scrutinizing its relationship to usefulness itself. This means resisting the methodological compulsion for all persons and things to become useful, and retaining the theological possibility that interpersonal experience—disabled and otherwise—may be useless.

This paper evaluates silence as a therapeutic practice in pastoral care for traumatic grief and loss. Informed by the history of attachment and mourning theory, its research considers the basic effect that empathy has upon the therapeutic relationship around psychic difference. The study appraises the potential resources and detriments that empathic language may have for the grief process. Offering clinical examples in hospice chaplaincy, it refutes the idea that silence is formulaic tool to be used. It instead offers silence as the acceptance of the limits of empathic language and the affirmation of psychological difference and theological wholeness.