I have been in the hospital, getting video EEG monitoring to check for seizure activity. I sprained my ankle on Wednesday, actually as I was leaving my house to come to the hospital. For some people, being in the hospital is a good time to rest and be taken care of. For me, it often […]
Posts in the disability awareness category:
“You haven’t let it limit you.”
“She hasn’t let blindness limit her.” This statement was recently written about me in an article that appeared in the local newspaper. A few days later, someone spoke the same words to me while discussing a potential speaking engagement: “You haven’t let blindness limit you.” I have been mulling over the statement since then, trying […]
What are we singing?
It has become fashionable to rewrite the words to songs so that they are gender inclusive or otherwise politically correct. Sometimes this has a fairly neutral effect. Sometimes it destroys a song’s theological meaning; and sometimes it is quite powerful. As a songwriter and a minister, and also as a person who is a member […]
students with disabilities, old wounds, and liberation
I once proposed to a staff person the idea of launching a support group on campus for students with disabilities, to provide a place for them to talk about experiences, share coping strategies, etc. The idea never went anywhere; and she suggested that students didn’t often feel comfortable talking about their disabilities and even seemed […]
hospitality in worship
Why am I going on about access to worship, the need for clear sound in worship, etc? Because the worship community is, for many people in postmodern America, the first stop on the way to the encounter with the Holy Spirit on the road to meeting Christ. I have written a chapter about Christian education […]
sound worship
Sound ministry… I am not talking about ministry based on sound biblical principles, though I certainly think this is important. I am talking about the ministry that occurs through your church’s sound technicians. If you send recordings to people who are homebound, offer them at a nominal cost to people who missed the service, or […]
seminary and learning styles
In many of my seminary classes, things were presented in charts. Obviously, I needed to find a different way of handling this information; for though I am skilled at handling charts, most charts don’t convert well to braille, and I didn’t have ready access to braille in seminary. I spent a fair amount of time […]
daily life in seminary
In order to get my seminary work done, I needed to scan my textbooks into the computer and then take time to read my assignments. I also scanned books from the library that I used for research assignments. In a given semester, I might scan as many as 10,000 pages. My scanning speed was affected […]
reflections on scanners and optical character recognition
Optical character recognition software is some of the most amazing stuff I’ve ever seen! It is also one of the technologies that has come the farthest in my lifetime. I first put my hands on a reading machine in the mid-1980s. The public library in my town got a “Kurzweil reading machine”–the hope was probably […]
the wounded place
Morris always acknowledged his debt to uninhibited college friends like Mike Martin. They were invaluable allies, because they regarded the integration of guide dogs in public places as both a challenge and a game. Morris recalled one episode in which he and a dozen friends entered an all-night diner in the small hours. When the […]