Tender to the World: Jean Vanier, L'Arche, and the United Church of Canada

by Carolyn Whitney-Brown

Overview

Jean Vanier’s spiritual vision and sense of humour shaped L’Arche, but the organization was also informed by its surprising history with the United Church of Canada. In Tender to the World Carolyn Whitney-Brown explores the connections between the two organizations through diverse critical insights from Julia Kristeva, Doreen Massey, and Mikhail Bakhtin, as well as Vanier's controversial articulation of the gift of weakness. Tracing the five-decade relationship between L'Arche and the United Church alongside evolving disability theories, Whitney-Brown examines both the fundamental importance of stories and the agency of people with intellectual disabilities. Inversion - a transformative overturning of expectations in social interactions - can be upsetting or exciting, challenging or inspiring, she argues. This book offers a fresh look at how L'Arche and the United Church have worked to break down walls of difference, illuminating how each tenders something unexpected to the other and to the world. At a time when many are seeking new visions for society, the long and complex relationship between Canada's largest Protestant denomination and L'Arche offers both encouragement and a deeper way to approach questions of living in diverse communities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780773559110
Publisher:	McGill-Queens University Press
Publication date:	10/16/2019
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Carolyn Whitney-Brown, a former member of L'Arche Daybreak, is a fellow at the University of Victoria's Centre for Studies in Religion and Society. She teaches in the department of religious studies at St. Jerome's University.

Editorial Reviews

"An important contribution to several disciplines, particularly the intersection between disability and religious studies. ... the news about Vanier allows the reader to approach the text with a more incisive and accurate view of the man at its centre, with an eye to this previously-hidden chapter in his history, opening the text and the range of topics it covers to deeper discussion and debate." Journal of Disability and Religion


"Avoiding a straightforward, chronological account of the history of L'Arche and the ucc, [Whitney-Brown] has organized this history thematically and semantically. One of her preoccupations is with how the experience of L'Arche, or what might be called the "witness" of L'Arche, might be articulated in such a way that it has general significance. To this end, she has drawn on such diverse thinkers as Julia Kristeva, Mikhail Bahktin, and Jane Bennett. In Whitney-Brown's account, they give us a way of thinking through the activity and promise of L'Arche, and, to a lesser extent, the ucc, outside of the traditional circuit of Christian self-understanding. This is a difficult path, and Whitney-Brown travels it with great sensitivity and attentiveness." Canadian Historical Review


"Mindful of Vanier's belief that personal transformation and social change come about not through ideas and theories but through relationships with others, Whitney-Brown focuses much of her book on recounting the stories of United Church members ... readers will likely be drawn to the many moving first-person accounts of how Jean Vanier and L'Arche touched people's lives." Broadview


"At this critical time for the United Church of Canada, this book makes a stunning and incisive contribution to help the reader understand the need for destabilizing and then transforming a community of faith." The Very Reverend and Honourable Lois M. Wilson


"Whitney-Brown explores the United Church's productive relationship to the Catholic thinker as a person — the encomia and rhapsodic homages border on sainthood by acclamation or canonization by vox populi — as well as through Vanier's incarnated vision of a ministry to people with intellectual disabilities. She does this by combining scholarly and pastoral approaches, the former by deploying various disability and cultural theories and the latter through profile and storytelling. It is a creative methodology, and Whitney-Brown shows a deft hand in managing it." Literary Review of Canada

From the Publisher