Background

Nancy Eiesland was born on April 6, 1964, in Cando, North Dakota, United States. She was the daughter of Dean and Carol Arnold. She had a congenital bone defect in her hips. Operations to remedy her birth defect began when she was a toddler. Her parents also took her to faith healers. She wrote that she was a poster child for the March of Dimes, a charity that some advocates for the disabled criticize for its appeals to pity.

Education

In high school, Nancy won a national contest with an essay on the inaccessibility of rural courthouses in North Dakota. She organized a letter-writing campaign on the issue.

She enrolled at the University of North Dakota, where she campaigned for ramps into the library and accessible parking spots. She dropped out after her beloved older sister was killed in an automobile accident.

Nancy enrolled in Central Bible College, which trained ministers, and graduated as valedictorian in 1986. She received a Master of Divinity from Candler School of Theology in 1991 and a Doctor of Philosophy from Emory University in 1995.

Career

Nancy Eiesland was an assistant professor from 1995 to 2001 and an associate professor of Sociology of Religion and Disability Studies at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta.

For 10 years, Eiesland consulted with the United Nations, helping develop its Convention on the Rights and Dignity of Persons with Disabilities. The convention describes the disabled as "subjects" with rights, rather than "objects" of charity. It explicitly endorses spiritual rights for the disabled.

In her book A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern Exurb, Nancy Eiesland focuses on the shifting landscape from city to suburb and the way that shift has impacted religious practices and the role of the church within communities. Basing her work on a study of church populations in Dacula, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, Eiesland follows the town's history from a rural agricultural region to an area of subdivisions and shopping malls within the space of a decade.

Eiesland has also edited several collections of academic essays. Human Disability and the Sendee of God: Reassessing Religious Practices is an outgrowth of a Louisville Institute conference on how churches serve their disabled members, as well as a result of Eiesland's personal interest in the topic as a disabled woman. Contemporary American Religions: An Ethnographic Reader, which Eiesland edited with Penny Edgell Becker, reflects the changing face of United States church congregations.

Achievements

• Nancy Eiesland was an outstanding theologian, sociologist as well as a prolific author. Eiesland's contribution was to articulate a coherent theology of disability.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability

    (The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disabil...)

    1994
  • Contemporary American Religion: An Ethnographic Reader

    (No single narrative or theory can describe the varieties ...)

    2000
  • Human Disability and the Service of God: Reassessing Religious Practice

    (A living religious tradition continually reassesses its p...)

    1998
  • A Particular Place: Urban Restructuring and Religious Ecology in a Southern Exurb 1999

Religion

Nancy and her stricken family joined the Assemblies of God and moved to Springfield, where the church has its headquarters. She became an Assemblies of God minister but gradually drifted away from the denomination.

Eiesland's complained that for all Christianity's professed concern for the poor and oppressed, the disabled were ignored.

By the time of her death Eiesland had come to believe that God was in fact disabled, a view she articulated in her influential 1994 book, "The Disabled God: Toward a Liberatory Theology of Disability." She pointed to the scene described in Luke 24:36-39 in which the risen Jesus invites his disciples to touch his wounds.

"In presenting his impaired body to his startled friends, the resurrected Jesus is revealed as the disabled God," she wrote. God remains a God the disabled can identify with, she argued - he is not cured and made whole; his injury is part of him, neither a divine punishment nor an opportunity for healing.

Politics

Nancy was a member of the Democratic party.

Views

Eiesland's insights added a religious angle to a new consciousness among the disabled that emerged in the 1960s in the fight for access to public facilities later guaranteed by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. The movement progressed into cultural realms as disabled poets, writers and dramatists embraced disability as both cause and identity.

Pointing out that anyone can become disabled at any time, the disabled called those without disabilities "the temporarily able-bodied." They ventured into humor, calling nondisabled people bowling pins because they were easy prey for wheelchairs.

Membership

Nancy was a member of the American Sociological Association, Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, and Association for Sociology of Religion.

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  American Sociological Association , United States

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  Society for the Scientific Study of Religion

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  Association for Sociology of Religion

Personality

By the time Nancy Eiesland was 13 years old, she had had 11 operations for the congenital bone defect in her hips and realized the pain was her lot in life. The reason, which seems clear enough to many disabled people, was that her identity and character were formed by the mental, physical and societal challenges of her disability. She felt that without her disability, she would "be absolutely unknown to myself and perhaps to God."

Interests

• Reading, writing

Connections

Nancy married Terry Eiesland on May 3, 1986. They had a daughter, Marie.

Father:

Dean Arnold

Mother:

Carol Arnold

Brother:

Neal Arnold

Brother:

Victor Arnold

Sister:

Katherine Arnold

Sister:

Jocelyn Gracza

husband:

Terry Eiesland

Daughter:

Marie Eiesland

colleague:

Penny Edgell Becker