‘….that all may have life and have it to the full…: EU policy and a just vision of the human person’.

Liam Waldron

I am interested in a dialogue between theology and secular politics in the European political context, which focuses on the issue of disability. I believe that Christian theology provides invaluable insights for those who formulate social policy on disability in the secular political sphere.

Having worked as a teacher, literacy tutor and campus minister in the past, in 2000 I went to work for National Learning Network, which is the largest non-governmental training agency in Ireland. It assists those people at a disadvantage in the labour market to learn the skills they need to build lasting careers in jobs that reflect their interests and abilities. The majority of learners enrolled on courses have some kind of disability. As a tutor of persons living with disabilities, and having studied theology formally in the past, I was frequently moved to ask myself questions of a theological nature about my work, some of which were questions about the nature of suffering or the meaning of community or the value of hope. For example at the opening of the Special Olympics in Dublin in 2003, Mrs. Kennedy-Shriver spoke about the many people with learning disabilities sitting at home wondering why it was that they had no friends. I thought of this in theological terms, as a failure of the type of community we are called to be as followers of Jesus Christ.

Naturally in my work I was subject to policies and procedures that were not founded directly on theological principles but I found it curious that theological and non-theological accounts of the (disabled) human person share the common language of rights and dignity and autonomy. For my dissertation I will work at the ‘boundary wall’ between these two accounts, and with a focus on disability, develop a theological anthropology that can dialogue with political notions of citizenship as they stand in the European political sphere.

So my research will focus on specific EU policies on disability which I will critique from a theological point of view with the help of insights from my dialogue partners which include Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier, political philosophers John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum and the late Pope, John Paul II.

Contact: wjwaldron@abdn.ac.uk