Sensation and Spirit: how disability reframes Protestantism on the Holy Spirit’s work

This paper turns to means the Holy Spirit employs to orient one to Christ’s person-forming work. Drawing out the narrative significance of bodily limits, as depictions of one’s need for God’s help, God’s power to provide, and enjoyment of divine gifts, shows that Protestants, like Luther, Wesley, and Calvin, deployed figurative language and metaphors of disability. These narrative deployments emphasize the Spirit’s use of sensation to stimulate awareness of divine activity. Indeed, analyzing disability’s textual function reveals how *hearing* the Word, the *taste* of faith, and pleasing *visions* construct a sensorial habitus. The Spirit, then, uses this habitus to carry one to the Word, restore relationships, and inspire fellowship. In contrast to criticisms of the Protestant tradition as overly intellectual and disinterested in sensation, the paper concludes to gesture towards a pneumatology that unearths Protestantism’s surprising compatibility with disability justice through its attention to sensation.