Crippled Grace

Shane Clifton wrote this book after adjusting to life as a quadriplegic, and it looks at the question of what makes a life happy and how a person can reach that happiness. He brings together Christian theology, philosophy, psychology, and the study of disability, using the lived experience of disabled people as a way into the question. Clifton works within the classical tradition that sees happiness as the flourishing of a whole life, built up through the steady practice of virtue, while also pushing back against parts of that tradition.

The book examines the virtues that help people handle reliance on others, push back against paternalism, and strengthen their own capacity to act. Drawing on thinkers from Aristotle to contemporary positive psychology, Clifton takes up pain and suffering, the worth of friendship, and new ways of thinking about sexual wellbeing. He also asks which virtues people with unusual bodies and minds need in a society that is not well designed for the wide range of ways people function.

Written both about and for people with disabilities, the book also treats disability as a window onto the human condition, with its fragility, vulnerability, and bodily limits. Clifton argues that disability is shaped as much by culture as by the body, and he builds a fuller account of flourishing that learns from disabled people instead of leaving them out. In the end, he argues that the experience of disability speaks to the fragility and happiness of every person and to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.