In Wondrously Wounded, lauded disability theologian Brian Brock weaves the practical and the theological into an analysis not only of disability, but the political and social structures that continue to threaten those members of our society with anomalous bodies. He opens his preface with a sensitive exposition of his relationship with his son Adam. ‘This book’, he notes, ‘is held together by a life lived under the label disability’ (p. xii); the story he tells is of a life lived ‘together’ (p. xiii) and in community. Brock is appropriately cautious about both the risks of instrumentalising his son's life: some use familial experiences to garner credentials in this sphere of scholarship. And he is aware that he is not presenting this book as some impossibly objective account of Adam's life or carefully distilled version of Adam's own voice. This reflective approach to his own story stands the reader in good stead: later, he will walk bravely into the political hotspot that is the abortion debate. Brock's fundamental approach is that of doxological hermeneutics: within this framework ‘disability’ is understood ‘as a creaturely phenomenon strung between creation and the final judgment’ (p. 9).

Part 1 of the book begins in the historical foundations of the church. In particular, Brock focuses on the shift in attitudes towards the exposure of anomalous infants over the course of the first four centuries of the Common Era. The historian in me wants to discuss if changing opinions among early Christians were actually about anomalous infants (or any infants), and whether or not they were as complete as he says. But this is beside the point. Here Brock both laments the decline of wonder in our own modern age and presses us to consider the reality of the incarnation as something that causes us to look at the fleshiness of the body. Vulnerability is not a matter of ‘need’ but rather a divine call. Here he directs us to the story of the Good Samaritan and the way in which the Samaritan has a bodily reaction to the suffering of another. Compassion, he shows us, is an embodied action.

Part 2 moves the Graeco-Roman notion of the ‘anomalous birth’ into the present and relates it to the complexities of prenatal screening. Though his arguments are not without precedent he sensitively articulates the reality of the current medical world: the mechanics of our modern medical world operate with the assumption that certain kinds of lives are expendable. Brock is not a pro-life crusader, he is not unsympathetic or unnuanced here; instead Brock examines the way that culturally constructed hopes and fears organise our modern medical praxis and lead to the othering of certain kinds of human beings. He shows that, while ‘prenatal testing aims at parental bonding with some unborn children, it also quietly encourages distancing from others’ (p. 91). It is, he says, the ‘sinful’ attraction to the idea of choosing one's life and to mirage-like promises of an easier life that causes people to shirk the divine invitation to receive other individuals into their life.

Part 3 moves to the lives of the disabled themselves and explores the often-ignored ways that educational, ecclesiastical and medical systems ignore and devalue the lives of the disabled. Drawing upon a particularly troubling healthcare report about the substandard care received by people with disabilities in the UK, Brock interrogates why it is that those with intellectual disabilities (in particular) are not accommodated in the world. He concludes that it is assumptions about fallenness and sin that cause people to project inadequate images of wholeness onto others.

Part 4 moves to the constructive and begins with the question, how might we think differently about those labelled disabled? Here Brock invites us to shrug off the language of insufficiency and reposition disability within a broader account of embodied creaturely flourishing.

In the final section of the book, part 5, Brock develops an account of Christian community in which in which attentiveness to other members and modes of listening (broadly construed) can shape the kinds of social forms and modalities that emerge in that community. The body of the church here is the ‘circulator’ of the gifts of the Spirit, and this model enables Brock to argue that it is possible to recognise the needs of those with disabilities without simultaneously reducing them to their perceived brokenness. Across these chapters we learn that the militancy of God is found in the ability to resist human beings’ rejection of one another: ‘Real political insurrection … demands rooting the dismissal and “othering” from the human hearts out of which it springs’ (p. 11).

The historian and biblical scholar in me wishes that Brock had interacted with more biblical and early church scholarship than he does. In the past ten years, disability criticism has made inroads into these areas of theological inquiry and it is disappointing that Brock does not utilise this material. This is a highly subjective quibble, however. Brock is speaking with confidence about the paradoxes in modern medical thought and practice and about the uneasy way in which modern Christians have adopted secular consumeristic assumptions. His is a powerful call to arms: to resist the social and cultural structures that induce us to distance ourselves from other and to accept the powerful command of the spirit to receive and embrace others. All of this he grounds in a richly developed incarnational theology of the flesh that is practically brought to bear upon the practices of societies and communities that should know better.