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Including religious voices on disability: which ones? In 2008 EP is featuring this 3-part series on Spiritual and Religious Supports, recognizing that faith, religion, and spirituality can be as important a consideration and as integral a facet in the lives of exceptional families as healthcare, education, and the myriad of other topics that touch and involve EP readers. This article presents installment two.

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Let's imagine, for a moment, that you are a pediatrician and you have made a commitment to holistic treatment of your patients--families and their children with one form of disability or another. Does that include religious beliefs and practices? But your background is Jewish, and, in our increasingly diverse society in the United States, your excellent reputation as a developmental pediatrician means that other families are coming to you, families who are Christian, Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist. What do you do when a family reveals something about the way their faith or religious tradition impacts their child or themselves in a way that seems harmful to you?

Or, you are a special educator or adult service provider, and you believe strongly in the value of community inclusion. So you make a commitment to include religious traditions and congregations as part of the pool of "generic community resources" or "natural supports" that are so important to the quality of life and services for people with disabilities and their families. But which traditions do you include? What is "normal" or "good" practice within different faiths? What may seem very "strange" to you may be very normal to someone else.

To compound it further, each one of those professionals and families lives in a time when disability and religion make the news in ways that tend to take individual experiences and generalize them to a whole faith tradition. For example, to read that insurgent forces in Iraq have used people with disabilities to be unwitting carriers of bombs into public places and then believe that is what all Muslims think about disability is just as wrong as assuming that the wonderful movie about Lior Liebling's acceptance and celebration of his gifts in prayer (www.prayingwithlior.com) means that all teenagers with disabilities receive the same kind of affirmation and inclusion within Jewish traditions. Would you assume that all Christians with disabilities are treated in the way exemplified by Jean Vanier and the L'Arche communities? That's just as bad as when others say that all people with one kind of disability or another think, feel, or act the same way.

Religious beliefs and traditions shape cultural and personal understandings of life issues, and, in turn, are shaped by new understanding...