Spiritual Misfits Podcast · Meeting Ground

'My Body is Not a Prayer Request' (Amy Kenny) [Replay]

·1 hr·3 clips

Amy says erasing disability to imagine abundance reveals a distorted notion of God.

1. Spiritual Misfits Podcast centers this conversation on Amy Kenney’s book My Body is Not a Prayer Request and the church’s treatment of disability. 2. Will Small hosts Amy Kenney, an Australian-born disabled scholar and educator, because her lived experience and writing shape the episode’s argument. 3. The episode asks what disability justice looks like when church spaces, theology, and everyday language all reinforce ableism. 4. Amy says she was taught that everyone is made in the image of God, then prayed over from age 11 to 17 for her disability to be erased. 5. She describes hearing words like “demonic,” “sinful,” and “get behind me, Satan,” and says those encounters “didn’t smell like Jesus.” 6. Amy tells a DMV story where a disability doubter questioned her disabled license plates in public. 7. An ex-felon then stopped to help her in the parking lot and shared his own story of being an outcast. 8. Amy uses that moment to connect disability, prison, and Matthew 25’s language of how people treat the vulnerable. 9. She says the most harmful ableism she has experienced has been inside the church, not outside it. 10. Amy defines ableism with T. L. Lewis’s language about hierarchies of value based on normalcy, intelligence, excellence, productivity, and worth. 11. She says ableism appears in slurs, assumptions about her husband, unwanted prayers for cure, and people pushing her wheelchair without consent. 12. She also points to church practices like demanding standing in liturgy and using disability as a negative in songs. 13. Amy argues that scripture itself is often read through ableist filters that erase disability from Moses, Elijah, Timothy, Zacchaeus, Paul, Jacob, and Jesus. 14. She distinguishes curing from healing by saying curing is quick and individual while healing is communal, ongoing, and restorative. 15. Amy says people often want her cured so they do not have to face their own discomfort, fear of disability, or need for structural change. 16. She critiques prosperity-gospel assumptions that equate faithfulness with health, wealth, productivity, and proving self-worth by a resume. 17. The conversation turns to the image of God, including Amy’s claim that her disabled body is a temple for the Holy Spirit and that she does not have a “junior Holy Spirit.” 18. Amy describes seeing divine wisdom in crooked trees, kangaroos, sharks, elephants, penguins, lions, and assistive technologies like texting and touchscreen devices. 19. The interview style is warm, reflective, and text-driven, with Will reading quotations from Amy’s book and asking follow-up questions about theology and church practice. 20. Listeners who care about disability, theology, and church reform will likely value this episode, while people looking for light devotional talk or no-access-needs critique may skip it.

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