“Rev. Ben Bond (He/They) is the Faith Inclusion and Belonging Associate at RespectAbility, a nonprofit organization fighting stigmas and advancing opportunities so people with disabilities can fully participate in all aspects of community.
Ben has earned their Master of Divinity Degree from Yale Divinity School along with a certificate from the Institute of Sacred Music and the Arts at Yale. An alumnus of Chapman University, he earned his Bachelor’s degree there in Religious studies. In his free time, Ben loves to nerd out about music, board games, and high-fantasy novels.
Ben is ordained in The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) which is a mainline progressive Christian denomination in the United States and Canada. Ben is a queer multiply disabled person with lived experience both growing up with a disability and acquiring one later in life. Faith inclusion and disability have been at the center of their work for many years. Ben founded and co-chaired Yale Divinity School’s first disability student organization named DivineAbilities which was dedicated to centering disability issues at an institutional level as well as providing a space for students to explore interpersonally their relationship between disability and faith communities.
Are There Disabled People in Heaven?
In the Christian theological imaginary, there has been the belief that heaven is the place of ultimate perfection that is in stark contrast to the mortal world of sin and imperfection. This presentation will examine how this framework can lead to an exclusion of disability and in turn disabled people from heaven. This topic is important to examine because the way Christian’s perceive the connection between heaven and disability has both otherworldly and earthly repercussions for how disabled people are treated in and outside of the church.