Meghan Henning: Well, Dr. Henning, thanks so much for joining us.
John Anthony Dunne: So we're really interested in talking about your your newest book. Hell hath no fury, and specifically the representation of of damned bodies, and you get into disability and gender in that book, and we wanted to kind of start this conversation out by hearing just a little bit about your background and your interest in disability studies in particular.
Meghan Henning: Yeah.
Meghan Henning: So my interest in disability studies began when I was a teenager. Long before that I knew something called Disability Studies existed, which is true, for a lot of the the those that that do this work. I was a teenager, and my grandmother was in was taking care of my grandfather, who was
Meghan Henning: dying of lung cancer.
Meghan Henning: and
Meghan Henning: when she found out that he was going to come home from the hospital and enter Hospice care like any good Italian grandmother would. She decided that she was going to go to the grocery store and buy enough groceries
Meghan Henning: to make all of his favorite foods for his last few weeks of life.
Meghan Henning: and she had been staying up around the clock for many months to take care of him and be with him anytime. He was awake.
Meghan Henning: and so she was very tired, and she went, waited till he fell asleep, went to the grocery store at 4 in the morning, filled her cart and her car up with all of the groceries that she would need, and on her way home from the hospital
Meghan Henning: she ran her car into a telephone pole. After she fell asleep with the wheel.
Meghan Henning: She sustained massive internal injuries. She had had open heart surgery years before, and that wound in her chest like opened, and her organs were all not where they were supposed to be. She had to be lifelighted to the hospital and have life saving surgery. They did save her life.
Meghan Henning: although her like had to be amputated.
Meghan Henning: And so she was in a coma, for I believe 2 months.
Meghan Henning: and my grandfather died 10 days after her car accident.
Meghan Henning: when she woke up from the coma, my family explained to her
Meghan Henning: what had happened, and she was understandably very sad about my grandfather's death, but
Meghan Henning: also, you know, concerned about her newly acquired disability. The doctors and nurses all reassured her, though that
Meghan Henning: even though she had lost her leg in the accident that she would walk again one day
Meghan Henning: through prospects, and
Meghan Henning: my
Meghan Henning: father also lost his job 6 months after her car accident. So my mom was going through a lot. My whole family was going through a lot. My grandmother was experiencing a lot, and our community of faith, being very, very supportive, came alongside my family and helped us process these events. But what I noticed as a teenager
Meghan Henning: is that people could be using the very same. The local texts.
Meghan Henning: and the very same tradition to try to support my family, and all mean very, very well.
Meghan Henning: And sometimes those interpretations of Scripture were helpful, and sometimes they were not.
Meghan Henning: And so that's how my interest in both Biblical studies and disability studies began. I at the time would have praised it as I was interested in questions of bodily suffering and Biblical interpretation, though when I encountered disability studies in graduate school, which I was introduced to you by
Meghan Henning: my best friend Canada Moss.
I
Meghan Henning: start. I found new language, and realized that I wasn't actually interested in questions of bodily suffering per se. I was interested in when it was that we interpreted someone's bodily difference as suffering, and when we did not.
Meghan Henning: my grandmother
Meghan Henning: was moved to a rehab center
Meghan Henning: after her accident, and shortly after that move was told by a different set of doctors that she did have spinal cord damage all of a sudden, and would never walk again.
Meghan Henning: and After that my entire family saw a complete demeanor change in my grandmother and her approach to her body and her life.
Meghan Henning: and she died in a hospital 2 years later, after her accident.
Meghan Henning: mostly living in rehab centers and hospitals.
and becoming depressed.
Meghan Henning: and after I was introduced to Disability studies, I could say that
Meghan Henning: I believe, and this is my interpretation of this story. Not anybody else's.
Meghan Henning: I believe that Ableism killed my grandmother.
Meghan Henning: She lost the will to live. When she found out
Meghan Henning: that she would never walk again.
Meghan Henning: and it was dramatic. The change that we saw in her so
Meghan Henning: disability studies offers a lens, offered me a lens for many years as a scholar, as a temporarily able bodied scholar for reading experiences that were a big part of my life. I have many friends with disabilities, many family members with disabilities. This is a big part of who we all are.
Meghan Henning: My student. I tell my students that they think that they're studying this in my courses because of somebody else. But it's also always about them.
Meghan Henning: because all of us will one day become disabled.
Meghan Henning: and that's what Leonard Davis says, you know, it's kind of the universalizing aspect of disability identity. However.
Meghan Henning: in the global pandemic, just almost a year ago now, I myself was diagnosed with Adhd.
Meghan Henning: and so
Meghan Henning: I didn't one day become disabled. I've always been disabled, and I just didn't know it.
Meghan Henning: So now I identify as a a disabled researcher who works on disability studies myself.
John Anthony Dunne: I I personally want to follow up on that because i'm i'm about to get tested for Adhd. But I I think I I've had it since I was a kid. I i'll find out soon enough. So this is off the pod, but anyways i'm really interested in that I want to
Meghan Henning: chat about that. Some Some of that. Yeah, we totally can. I think that it's actually I ran into a colleague who's at another school at Ud like a different part of the university, and she I told her about my diagnosis recently. She's like, oh, my gosh! I think there's a large percentage of Academics who have undiagnosed Adhd, who've been treating it with high amounts of caffeine for their entire life. That is literally true. I discovered it in seventh grade, and like seriously, I i'm cappuccino, since I've experienced. Oh, my, gosh, okay, and my dad.
Meghan Henning: I like I'm not exaggerating. This is true. We would count 12 pots of.
Meghan Henning: and so like when I found out that this was genetic, I was like, oh, shoot! We definitely have this. Yeah. Well, we we can. We can push. Pause on this. For now, Steph, do you want to do the follow up question
Steph Judd: I intuitively at follow up on. That is one of one of the things that's been coming up is the way in which disability is so morally frightened in our communities. Usually, do you want to go there, go for it. You go for it, and then i'll follow up on the next question.
Steph Judd: Thank you so much for sharing that with us, Megan. I think that one of the things that's come out in throughout this series has been the ways in which disability is so morally freighted and usually in kind in unconsciously negative ways.
Steph Judd: Can you hash out to us
Meghan Henning: mit ctl and the kinds of contours of those implicit messages that you think that your grandmother was receiving about herself after she she lost her leg. Yeah, so 250
Meghan Henning: there's within Disability Cities theory. There's a a literary trope that literate like English scholars of disability studies call the moral test theory.
Meghan Henning: and the idea is that in most literature, when people with disability or film, when people with disabilities are present.
Meghan Henning: They're not really the hero or the main character of the story.
Meghan Henning: They're they're put there
Meghan Henning: so that we can see how the other characters in the story respond to their disability, and whether or not those other characters are good people.
Meghan Henning: based on how they respond to the disabled body in their mixed, who is sometimes like not even a 3 dimensional person.
Meghan Henning: the
Meghan Henning: the ways in which community members. So I mentioned my parent, our church community.
Meghan Henning: There there were people who would say things like
Meghan Henning: Well, you know, my mother was sick
Meghan Henning: 2
Meghan Henning: and I we just really prayed hard for her, and she got better.
Meghan Henning: So we just need to like, pray really hard
Meghan Henning: for your mom or your grandmother.
Meghan Henning: and like
Meghan Henning: as still a young Disability Rights activist says in her, Ted talk right. No amount of like looking at a flight of stairs and radiating a positive attitude or praying about them. Changing into a ramp. Right is going to make that happen so
Meghan Henning: it can be very frustrating, but it is also ethically freighted right. The idea in the prayer example is that
Meghan Henning: if my family was just maybe more spiritual.
Meghan Henning: We wouldn't be having this experience with disability, like maybe my grandma would have woken up from her cupcoma sooner if we just been better prayers.
Meghan Henning: Don't know right. That was the implication that was there so, and I don't think that's uncommon that wasn't a narrative that those individuals made up. They were trying to make us feel better.
Meghan Henning: Right it so that was the most widely, readily available script.
Meghan Henning: Yeah, that's it, and that and so I don't fault any of those individuals who said those things they have picked up in their culture
Meghan Henning: this widely held attitude
Meghan Henning: that
Meghan Henning: some particular kind of body
Meghan Henning: is better than other kinds of bodies.
Meghan Henning: and
Meghan Henning: if you are
Meghan Henning: morally, ethically doing the right things, you will receive
Meghan Henning: that superior kind of body.
Meghan Henning: and if you're not.
Meghan Henning: then that's when you end up in
Meghan Henning: a different body, a not normative body, a disabled body, according to the narrative of the parent culture, and as someone who does work on the local text. I can say that our culture is not unique in this way, right. There are other cultures and civilizations that had a similar attitude and approach
Meghan Henning: to disability, and that is in part where we get some of these ideas, especially if we are part of traditions that hold those texts as central. But also if we're in cultures that are influenced by those texts, whether or not we ascribe to them.
John Anthony Dunne: And of course, in your research. You've
John Anthony Dunne: demonstrated how a lot of this is operative in early Christian texts and and their descriptions of hell and the people who are there, and the representation of damned bodies, and we're curious to kind of hear more about that in particular, and would love to kind of set that up a little bit by hearing a a bit about your first book on hell, educating early Christians to the rhetoric of hell published by more. See, Beck.
John Anthony Dunne: you tell us a little bit about how hell is educational, how the rhetoric of hell is educational for early Christians to kind of help set up this conversation about its representation. The early Christian representation of damned bodies in particular.
Meghan Henning: Thanks.
Meghan Henning: So
Meghan Henning: in the first project
Meghan Henning: I had started to read some of these texts well back up a little.
Meghan Henning: I had this interest right? That was grounded in this experience, and I started reading the theological text that are kind of, or the New Testament studies, Biblical interpretation text that are standard training for New Testament scholars.
Meghan Henning: So I was in a seminar, and I, reading bolt on as you do in graduate school
Meghan Henning: and in his New Testament theology
Meghan Henning: he has this line about how you know
Meghan Henning: there are these passages that describe weeping and gnashing of tea, or outer darkness, or eternal torment, or Hades, but those aren't part of the essential theology, or the karigma, as he calls it, of the Church.
Meghan Henning: Those are the things from the outside cultures pagans, namely, he calls them right Greeks enrollments, and who, he says, this is just
Meghan Henning: triple from the outside culture. This isn't the kernel of the Jesus message. It's not. It's got nothing to do with that.
Meghan Henning: And I thought well, that would be convenient
Meghan Henning: if it were true
Meghan Henning: that
Meghan Henning: you know
Meghan Henning: Jesus isn't
Meghan Henning: meaning for this to be the ethical center of the message, but that this is just part of the outset culture.
Meghan Henning: But I thought it had. Surely it had to be more complicated than that.
Meghan Henning: and and I started to suspect that perhaps it wasn't totally true, because I had done a lot of thinking about apocalypticism already.
Meghan Henning: and
Meghan Henning: and I knew that
Meghan Henning: many people thought that the apocalyptic outlook was kind of central
Meghan Henning: to who the earthly person of Jesus was, and to his ministry. And so then I had. I wanted. I began to be interested in thinking about
Meghan Henning: what exactly
Meghan Henning: was Jesus doing
Meghan Henning: when he invoked these images
Meghan Henning: that we associate with how
Meghan Henning: there at that point there was a lot of work like Alan Seales and other scholars who had kind of said, look like this is, you know we can separate these things out. We can say, you know.
Meghan Henning: Hades is just a a reference to Roman notions of torture, and when we seek a Hannah like that's that's the valley outside of
Meghan Henning: the city. And
Meghan Henning: and so really there's no hell in the New Testament, right? And so, even you know.
Meghan Henning: late twentieth century, early 20 first century scholarship on hell was still really trying to cling to this idea that hell wasn't in the New Testament, and I just
Meghan Henning: I couldn't believe it. And so I started to do the research and started to think about ethics and rhetoric in the ancient world, and I got acquainted with the work
Meghan Henning: on a crisis or visual rhetoric.
Meghan Henning: and what I started to learn as I started to look at that literature is that as
Meghan Henning: Greek and Roman students were trained in the basic
Meghan Henning: founding the building blocks of rhetoric and education, they frequently had to memorize
Meghan Henning: Alright.
Meghan Henning: Odyssey
Meghan Henning: and a need
Meghan Henning: but not just any parts of the Odyssey and the a. In the Educational handbooks.
Meghan Henning: The most frequently memorized passages of those texts
Meghan Henning: We're, Odyssey 11,
Meghan Henning: and I need 6.
Meghan Henning: The tour of held chapters. Okay. So I had suspected that this worked educationally that is, that
Meghan Henning: in ancient contexts people talked about eternal punishment in order to try to persuade or convince their audience that they needed to behave in particular ways.
Meghan Henning: and had an ethical message.
Meghan Henning: But when I found out that a number of the educational had
Meghan Henning: a focus on these particular chapters, and then you have rhetoricians talking about how rhetorical training is all part of the ethical formation of the soul of the the student.
Meghan Henning: It it became clear to me
Meghan Henning: that when
Meghan Henning: students were trained in rhetoric, especially descriptive rhetoric, visual rhetoric.
Meghan Henning: they were taught to tug at people's emotions, to persuade people using emotions that were familiar to them by
Meghan Henning: from other experiences or encounters with other stories.
Meghan Henning: and
Meghan Henning: that kind of experience was meant to have
Meghan Henning: a powerful effect on your audience. So it's not coincidental that this language that these descriptions that would invoke fear.
Meghan Henning: We're commonly used in educational context, and then get used by the Jesus movement authors
Meghan Henning: in educational contexts in the Gospels
Meghan Henning: that's not a coincidence that's by design.
Meghan Henning: both on the part of
Meghan Henning: to talk, and
Meghan Henning: Virgil and Plato
Meghan Henning: and
Meghan Henning: Matthew.
Meghan Henning: who
Meghan Henning: has these teaching moments in throughout the Gospel, where Jesus is
Meghan Henning: serving as educator and trying to persuade audiences to behave in particular ways.
Meghan Henning: So I,
Meghan Henning: that first project was really about trying to figure out what was the hell language doing.
Meghan Henning: and
Meghan Henning: not as much about.
Meghan Henning: Where did it come from?
Meghan Henning: But
Meghan Henning: where? What? What is it doing when Christians are pulling this from the broader culture? To say that it comes from the broader culture doesn't really
Meghan Henning: change the fact that it's still in the Google text. And it was still used by early Christians and later Christians for thousands of years as well. So I think that getting it at at what the language is doing
Meghan Henning: can help us think more carefully about what we're doing
Meghan Henning: when we read it today.
Steph Judd: Hmm. That's so helpful again
Steph Judd: as you're talking about the kinds of visual rhetoric that they used in the border culture, but also in early Christian communities is anything distinctive about the kinds of visual rhetoric that is invoked
Steph Judd: in the Christian tradition as opposed to the broader culture, and and similarly to dovetail that question.
Steph Judd: Is it anything
Steph Judd: distinct about the way that it's used?
Meghan Henning: That's different for Christians?
Meghan Henning: Yeah. So
Meghan Henning: so 2 so a 2 part question. I'm going to start with actually
Meghan Henning: the second part, and work back to the first about the images. So the second part where you asked, is there anything distinctive about the way that it's used.
Meghan Henning: It's similar to other instances in this sense that it's consistently used for ethical education.
Meghan Henning: What is distinctive about the way that it is used in the Gospels and in the early Christian Apocalypse is that follow those Gospels and and interpret them.
Meghan Henning: is that it's focused always
Meghan Henning: on care of the other, and you get some of the solution. For example, the comedian. He does have this great passage, where in Hades the poor are carrying or sorry. The poor are riding on donkeys
Meghan Henning: who are the rich
Meghan Henning: and the rich, have to carry the poor around, for like 250 years in Hades. So you get this reversal of Fortunes thing in other
Meghan Henning: cultures and the broader culture. But what you get in the early Christian text is that there's not only this reversal of fortune like we see in Luke 16, for example, with the rich man and Lazarus, but the idea that
Meghan Henning: specifically
Meghan Henning: how you treat
Meghan Henning: the people in the world
Meghan Henning: who are seen as the least
Meghan Henning: will will be, how you are judged
Meghan Henning: in this life and in the next right. You're meant to change your behavior now.
Meghan Henning: and
Meghan Henning: the most we I mean in the contemporary world like
Meghan Henning: when people imagine how they particularly usually think about individual license. And to be sure, those are there too. I always say that, like if you're the if you think that hell exists like, we're all going there right, because these are like very comprehensive lists.
Meghan Henning: and no one's left out. Okay. But
Meghan Henning: our contemporary focus is always on these individualized, since.
Meghan Henning: But
Meghan Henning: these ancient texts are very concerned about like, who's who's feeding the poor and the hungry who is providing offerings to those who are without, and the broader society who's serving a got a meals to travelers like.
Meghan Henning: It's very much about how you're taking care of others and community which I think is distinctive, especially from our own assumptions about what might be going on in those texts. It's never. It's really rarely ever
Meghan Henning: in the earliest text about belief. It does become about belief later on by some of the fourth and fifth century text, where you could be excluded by denying the incarnation for example, but that's
Meghan Henning: that's a later development.
Meghan Henning: And matthew 25.
Meghan Henning: The goats are those who don't care for other people in community, the images, the first part of your question is that Christians both borrow other images that are really common in other texts that are earlier, both in Jewish apocalyptic literature and in
Meghan Henning: Greek and Roman visions.
Meghan Henning: But then they also dramatically amplify it. So when I say, in the subtitle of the book, like the invention of damned bodies, I mean it quite literally, that
Meghan Henning: nobody imagines damnation
Meghan Henning: with the severity
Meghan Henning: and intensity that early Christians did
so.
Meghan Henning: And really early Christians are basing
Meghan Henning: these images off of
Meghan Henning: images of
Meghan Henning: ancient prisons and torture that are in their midst in the Roman period.
Meghan Henning: So so some of the images are
Meghan Henning: are clearly part of antecedent text and traditions like, for example, the presence of fire.
Meghan Henning: But other things
Meghan Henning: like dampness, darkness.
Meghan Henning: noxious fumes were part of, for example, like the Lake of Averness, or like sulfur
Meghan Henning: sulfuric spaces, but they were also a really prominent part of ancient prisons which would be underground mines
Meghan Henning: with
Meghan Henning: just to be clear. No bathrooms.
Meghan Henning: so they did, in fact, smell like feces.
and
Meghan Henning: that is
Meghan Henning: I'm really looking forward to the work of Mark. Let me and Matthew Larson, who have a book on Ancient prisons coming out soon, which I
Meghan Henning: I think is gonna be phenomenal for helping us understand how early Christians are really drawing on these ancient punitive tactics and and practices. But basically early Christian hell is like the minds, only just
Meghan Henning: unimaginably worse, because you can't ever get out. And John Chris system says that in one of his treatises he says like it's like the minds. But worse. This is how they imagined it.
John Anthony Dunne: and and that point about the invention of of damned bodies and and kind of the distinctiveness of the Christian representations of damnation. In this way I i'm wondering if I if if you could extend this and and tell us a little bit more about the representations of of disability. In particular. You talk about gender as well. I'm curious to to hear more about the ways in which a disability, if factors into these depictions of hell.
Meghan Henning: Thank you. Sorry. I was probably supposed to answer that with the last question.
Meghan Henning: Alright, Thank you for that question. Yeah. So the
Meghan Henning: the way in which the damned bodies in early Christian hell are depicted.
Meghan Henning: As I was first
Meghan Henning: reading the
Meghan Henning: early Christian Apocalypse, which the second book focuses on
Meghan Henning: Alright.
Meghan Henning: I had Canada Moss had written her article, her Jbl. Article on the Woman with the flow of power
Meghan Henning: for the man with the flow of power. Sorry
Meghan Henning: reading Jesus in the story of the one with the flow of blood and and the way in which gender plays a role in that story and embodiment and disability. And
Meghan Henning: as I was writing, the first book
Meghan Henning: was really really
Meghan Henning: aware, all of the sudden, that these bodies are all being read.
Meghan Henning: not according to our standards of embodiment and torture. And what is going on with bodies when these 2 things that are described, what happened to them, but according to ancient ones right. The cultural model of disability says that disability is both something biological, but also something that is defined by a culture.
Meghan Henning: And
Meghan Henning: so, as I was reading
Meghan Henning: these texts
Meghan Henning: that describe
Meghan Henning: bodies being changed before the eyes of the reader, it was very apparent to me
Meghan Henning: that all of the types of bodies that were described as punished.
Meghan Henning: We're womanly
Meghan Henning: a semin it
Meghan Henning: week. Lead the
Meghan Henning: disabled bodies, and to be clear in antiquity.
Meghan Henning: just like in many contacts today
Meghan Henning: to be disabled is to be female.
Meghan Henning: and to be part of
Meghan Henning: minoritize part of the gender hierarchy of the broader culture.
Meghan Henning: And so
Meghan Henning: I started to look at ancient medical texts more closely
Meghan Henning: for clues
Meghan Henning: as to what some of these punishments might mean.
Meghan Henning: One of the examples in the book, for example, is worms. Okay, so we know from the Isaiah 66 passes. There's this reference to the one that never dies. And I had always, when I was reading these texts before
Meghan Henning: thought that these worms that were eating people's bodies, or spewing forward forth from their intestines.
Meghan Henning: We're like earthworms.
Meghan Henning: right like.
Meghan Henning: And I thought, well, that's gross, maybe, but not really scary.
Meghan Henning: And then I started reading into the ancient medical literature about
Meghan Henning: so kinds of worms that ancient folks would have been truly afraid of and concerned by, and namely, intestinal.
Meghan Henning: and I became immediately convinced that the worms in hell
Meghan Henning: or intestinal worms. But intestinal worms and antiquity were thought mostly to impact women and children.
Meghan Henning: because
Meghan Henning: ancient medical authors thought that they grew
Meghan Henning: in women's uterus and a woman's uterus that that's actually where they were formed.
Meghan Henning: and that's why, then, babies were boring frequently with worms, and needed to have treatment for worms right away. We take for granted that there are
Meghan Henning: safe and effective medical treatments for this kind of ailment in the contemporary world, especially in the United States.
Meghan Henning: Most of us, Don't, think about like how horrible it would be to have intestinal parasites.
But in the ancient world this was deadly
Meghan Henning: and very serious and terrifying.
Meghan Henning: and a threat that was ever present.
Meghan Henning: So I
Meghan Henning: suddenly.
when you have
Meghan Henning: church officials who are being punished in hell in the early Christian Apocalypsees, with worms that are spewing forth from their mouth
Meghan Henning: for their intestines.
Meghan Henning: These are male church officials who have been made womanly
Meghan Henning: and disabled for all of eternity, and that is their punishment.
Meghan Henning: And so the damned body is the effeminate body and the disabled body, which then, in turn, if we think about the Co. The way that disability and notions of disability are formed culturally
Meghan Henning: means that
Meghan Henning: ancient hearers of these texts and traditions we're associating
Meghan Henning: the disabled and womanly bodies in their midst
Meghan Henning: with sin and punishment.
Meghan Henning: So disability studies before had frequently
Meghan Henning: or more broadly
Meghan Henning: focused on positive examples of disability and antiquity. So, thinking about some of the super crypt tropes in myth in Greek and Roman myth, for example, or looking at the ancient Asclepia as examples of like
Meghan Henning: healing and health care, and a positive focus on the disabled body, and and had kind of almost
Meghan Henning: through the cultural model of disability, looked at the ancient world as this, like wonderful
Meghan Henning: era, where
Meghan Henning: people weren't as able as they are now.
Meghan Henning: and thought that Ableism was something that we kind of invented.
Meghan Henning: you know, thinking about like, for example, fucose birth of the clinic, imagining that
Meghan Henning: we Ableism really came to fruition in the light of modern medicine. And one of the things that I discovered through my work on hell is that these moralizing assumptions about the body may be very different from antiquity, and we do need to think about how
Meghan Henning: notions of the body and antiquity are different from our own.
Meghan Henning: But I don't think that we can say
Meghan Henning: that disability and antiquity was always viewed positively
Meghan Henning: because this is one clearing example of the disabled body being associated with moral failure.
Steph Judd: I just follow up on what you said about, you know to be females to be disabled and just understanding this link a little bit more. Was it? Was it. That was this coupling of
Steph Judd: femaleness and disability? Was that just a random bundling of 2 bad things, bad outcomes to decentivize certain behaviors? Or was there a logical link
Meghan Henning: between those 2 things. That that is a great question. Thank you. It there was a logical link.
Meghan Henning: so the medical authors were observing closely like we like to think about. When my students read ancient medicine, they expect that Hippocrates and Galen are going to get a whole bunch of things wrong, and some really humorous ways, and it's going to be like random old tiny medicine. That's what they're expecting.
Meghan Henning: But they knew a lot of stuff about how bodies work, and they didn't always understand the things that we can understand when we look under a microscope in terms of causality. But Galen has this long treatise on how like he wishes people would stop confusing causation and and correlation.
and I have my premed students read this so they're like, oh, wait a minute.
Meghan Henning: So they were observing a lot of things, and they were getting a lot of things right. One of the things that we know from the Osteooreological data is that women in this period of history
Meghan Henning: died earlier than men.
and by a significant margin.
Meghan Henning: so their idea that the female body was weaker in constitution
Meghan Henning: was probably based on this right. Women died.
Meghan Henning: Now what they didn't know is that their insistence that women have
Meghan Henning: as many children as possible in as rapid of succession as possible, with no prenatal supplementary vitamins.
Meghan Henning: was probably what was causing. So you know
Meghan Henning: their bones were fallen apart, their bodies were falling apart because they were being expected to do things that other people were not being expected to do with their bodies. So they're observing this
Meghan Henning: in a way.
Meghan Henning: and then saying, oh, well, women's bodies are
Meghan Henning: weaker women's bodies are
Meghan Henning: more likely to be ill Women's bodies are more prone to
Meghan Henning: a number of disabilities.
Meghan Henning: and
Meghan Henning: and so.
Meghan Henning: Yes, there was a logical connection. But then there's also
Meghan Henning: a huge
Meghan Henning: cash
Meghan Henning: of literature and story that develops around this
Meghan Henning: such that it would have taken quite a lot
Meghan Henning: great
Meghan Henning: to push back against that tide.
Meghan Henning: All right.
Meghan Henning: with any kind of
Meghan Henning: contrary vision
Meghan Henning: of that woman
Meghan Henning: female body.
Meghan Henning: So
Meghan Henning: both
Meghan Henning: is my answer to your question.
John Anthony Dunne: So I i'm curious about how some of this might differ from a New Testament representation of hell and representation of damned bodies, especially since Your second book is more focused on the early Christian apocalyptic literature that is written later on. Do you see a development in either the nature of hell itself, or a, or the representation of the bodies that reside there. Do do you see any kind of development in that kind of in the understanding and the representation.
Meghan Henning: Yeah, the
Meghan Henning: The bodies that reside there are not described
Meghan Henning: with the same breadth of detail
Meghan Henning: in the New Testament text. So in the the first book. I talk about this as kind of an archaea or a fascist, and I say, like we, these are definitely examples of descriptive rhetoric that are meant to evoke the imagination. However, the focus there is really on
Meghan Henning: the ethical behavior that you're meant to avoid, and then there's some detail that's given, but it's meant to link you to other texts that talk about this or other things. You might have heard about
Meghan Henning: places of eternal punishment and evoke those emotions. There's less
Meghan Henning: focus on
Meghan Henning: particular bodies receiving particular measure for measure of punishments.
Meghan Henning: We get in Luke 16 the biggest description right of the rich man, and Lazarus and the rich man, says he's in agony in these flames, and that's the closest thing we have to this like elaborate description of punishment and certainly agony and
Meghan Henning: physical torment and emotional responses are all assigned to
Meghan Henning: of some in it.
Meghan Henning: and disable bodily states and punitive
Meghan Henning: experiences.
Meghan Henning: But
Meghan Henning: that is nothing like what we see in the Apocalypse is in terms of like the level of detail. The level of detail in those early Christian Apocalypse is is much much
Meghan Henning: higher. We it's so we're able to then trace that to specific kinds of bodies in a different kind of way.
Steph Judd: something that
Steph Judd: I i'd love to hear
Steph Judd: your thoughts on
Steph Judd: is
Steph Judd: reverting back to your earlier comment about how one of the distinctive about representations of all the way, that the way that these kinds of
Steph Judd: visual rhetoric was used in communities was that Christian communities tended to be more focused on.
Steph Judd: You know your care for the vulnerable, the weakest now impacts on your eternal destination.
Steph Judd: Yeah, how did how did these images of disabled bodies
Steph Judd: affect the way that communities actually treated
Meghan Henning: people with disabilities to? Is there any I don't know there's any record of that of that. That's one of the stunning things about this
Meghan Henning: transition in a very short period of time. Right? Is that
Meghan Henning: a rhetorical trope that was meant
Meghan Henning: to provide ethical instruction on how you should care for marginalized bodies in your midst
Meghan Henning: is then leveraged or uses marginalized bodies to reinforce this trope over time, so that there's
Meghan Henning: almost
Meghan Henning: no attention to the
Meghan Henning: the
Meghan Henning: kind of sad irony there of how
Meghan Henning: how this happens in the literature
Meghan Henning: women are the I talk about this in the book in chapter 2 on the way that different punishments change over time right? Because of these texts are actually written over a long period of time. That's one of the kind of hard things about this project is that
Meghan Henning: you know the the New Testament text to written the first century, and some of the text that I'm talking about are written between the second century Ce. And the sixth century, CD. So like huge
Meghan Henning: huge period of time. And so what this allows us to do, though.
Meghan Henning: is to trace the way in which the sins that are punished change over time.
And so, whereas in these earlier texts in the second century
Meghan Henning: we have and I specifically trace that with respect to gender, we have a focus on
Meghan Henning: women.
Meghan Henning: and then
Meghan Henning: being responsible for punishments related to children and family.
Meghan Henning: In the beginning of the period I'm. Talking about by the medieval period, women exclusively
Meghan Henning: are responsible
Meghan Henning: for punishments pertaining to children and family. Specifically. You can even be punished if you don't offer your breast to somebody else's infant to keep them alive.
Meghan Henning: and one of the later texts. So
Meghan Henning: the
Meghan Henning: it is.
Meghan Henning: Social
Meghan Henning: contacts in which each text was written very much determines what kind of
Meghan Henning: virtue is being exhorted here.
Meghan Henning: And Yet
Meghan Henning: there really aren't any
Meghan Henning: punishments
Meghan Henning: for people who treat
Meghan Henning: people with disabilities badly
Meghan Henning: in any of the text that I know of.
Meghan Henning: so it's
Meghan Henning: at least not.
Meghan Henning: I mean
Meghan Henning: not directly.
John Anthony Dunne: I'm. I'm. Curious about the the flip side of the representation of dam bodies, because, of course, developing concurrently, is this expectation of a perfect body for those who enter into the list, and i'm wondering if you could maybe speak to that a little bit.
Meghan Henning: Yeah, Candidate Austin. I have an article that's coming out in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion that we co-authored on exactly that question and it we've already. It's already gone through proofs so like any day now, but so hopefully, it'll be out by the time as podcasters. But
Meghan Henning: where she covers the heaven side, and I what and we wrote it together. But you know it is obvious right what happened there. So so
Meghan Henning: yeah, I'm always thinking about these things in conversation with her, and she is influenced.
Meghan Henning: all of my work really so. Her early work in on that in that another jar article
Meghan Henning: on
Heavenly
Meghan Henning: Depictions of Bodies and disability
Meghan Henning: was hugely influential for me. As I was thinking about this project, and thinking about the way in which this is absolutely framing Christian eschatological
Meghan Henning: formation wholesale.
Meghan Henning: so
Meghan Henning: the article is called pulling apart and piecing together
Meghan Henning: right. But
Meghan Henning: there are absolutely visions of the afterlife in antiquity, especially among ancient Christians, where
Meghan Henning: heavenly bodies are those that are restored to some kind of norm. And one of the things that I say in the book, I think, is really
Meghan Henning: important, that I've gleaned from disabilities to do theory is, you know, Rosemary Garland Thompson always has like
Meghan Henning: in any society, but especially in our contemporary one, which is what she writes on
Meghan Henning: Well, the body that's considered normative is inhabited by something like 15% of the population right? Only 25% of our current population identifies as disabled, and antiquity would have been much, much higher right because of the way that health care worked in antiquity, and what they did and did not have right. You wouldn't have something like corrective lenses that most of us use
Meghan Henning: in our advancing years to see right, so most people could expect to go blind before they died.
Meghan Henning: And so in antiquity. What I what is also saying to me about this work is that in a population where the disabled body actually was, the majority of the population.
Meghan Henning: there is still an emphasis on understanding a particular minority body as the norm that you're trying to attain.
Meghan Henning: and
Meghan Henning: that I think fuels, visions of heavenly afterlives, where
Meghan Henning: aesthetic
Meghan Henning: and
Meghan Henning: masculine perfection
Meghan Henning: are
Meghan Henning: entirely defined by the culture of the person's writing these visions of heaven.
Meghan Henning: but
Meghan Henning: it is perpetuated in the same way that the notions of the disabled body and how are
Meghan Henning: which is that this idea of
Meghan Henning: restoration is absolutely tied to the bottling arms of the broader culture, and then continues to be elaborated on across time.
John Anthony Dunne: I know in Kandemas's work, and in a number of other Scotland. Another, a number of other scholarly treatises on like eschatology and disability. The body of Jesus, the resurrected body of Jesus is often pointed to.
John Anthony Dunne: I'm wondering in early Christian texts do we see any reflection that mirrors the kind of reflection that we're? We're currently, seeing you know where where people are appealing to the the the the resurrected body of Jesus as as sort of the paradigm for the the the resurrected body rather than an exception. Do do you have any examples of that in our Christian literature
Meghan Henning: in hell has no fury. The liver directly the
Meghan Henning: the May. The Book of Mary's repose, as I call it in English.
Meghan Henning: has a fascinating section
Meghan Henning: where
Meghan Henning: Jesus has been happened with the disciples, and they're just kind of hanging out having a conversation as you do right. Mary just came up. Join everybody. And so they're having a chat, and
Meghan Henning: the disciples say to him.
Meghan Henning: Why do you still have your wounds?
Meghan Henning: And they start like pointing to the stigmata, and they're very like disturbed by this.
Meghan Henning: and
Meghan Henning: and the response
Meghan Henning: is something like, and i'm going to mess this up because I don't have things memorized super well, but but it's something like
Meghan Henning: I'm gonna have these wounds until everybody learns what they need to learn.
Meghan Henning: So Jesus, his wounds persist in heaven. He is, or his scars right
Meghan Henning: as Moss interpret them and divine bodies.
Meghan Henning: He he! He keeps the scars.
Meghan Henning: and they're important.
Meghan Henning: It's not an accident.
Meghan Henning: God didn't goof
Meghan Henning: in resurrecting his body with these scars.
Meghan Henning: They are meant to be educational for the audience
Meghan Henning: now
Meghan Henning: that is both a great representation of disability in eschatology, but it's also fits with the literary trope within disability
Meghan Henning: literature, where
Meghan Henning: the the body of the disabled person is
Meghan Henning: there for the pedagogical value of others
right.
Meghan Henning: so that, and that reading
Meghan Henning: right that Jesus offers for the disciples is
Meghan Henning: kind of a common cultural one of like well.
Meghan Henning: and
Meghan Henning: that I wrote about that in the act of Peter Articles earlier in my career. Right that Peter's daughter has this function, for example.
Meghan Henning: our Her disability is entirely but kind of
Meghan Henning: pedagogical literary device for Peter and the people who are
looking at her.
Meghan Henning: So yeah. But there are definitely
Meghan Henning: a number of strands in early Christian thought that see that
Meghan Henning: alright.
Meghan Henning: the wound, the scarred or wounded body of Jesus, as
Meghan Henning: the one that we should be looking to for information about how
Meghan Henning: how the resurrected body will look, and it's not
Meghan Henning: one that meets the normative standard of
Meghan Henning: the day.
John Anthony Dunne: Steph, do you want to ask that final final question?
John Anthony Dunne: I I I'll just say, really quick. We we actually have coming next. She She'll be on next week. So your your ups is actually coming on a Wednesday. So I that's why I laugh. I'm really hopeful. Yeah, when you said maybe the article be out. I was like, oh dear, no. But the proofs. I edited the proofs like seriously in December. I don't know we. We. We edited them.
Meghan Henning: We submitted the proofs back.
John Anthony Dunne: Maybe it was New November. It was a while ago. It was November or October, so tomorrow, hopefully I can get tomorrow. But but we talked with Kylie Crab about the exit, Peter, so that that' be a nice segue he'll be on that next week. But go ahead, Steph. Do you want to just add, as a final queue or something like that?
Steph Judd: Yeah.
Steph Judd: yeah, that's
Steph Judd: 1 one of the the the enduring themes. It's come a come up a lot as we've spoken to people throughout this series has been that
Steph Judd: actually call it literary trope or it, You know generally the ways in which people with a disability are treated as objects rather than subjects. And as a final question, as we kind of zoom out, and you know you take your work, and you think about how it
Steph Judd: applies to our communities. Now in the way we speak about
Steph Judd: people with disability.
Steph Judd: Generally speaking, the way we think about where we're heading shapes the way we treat people. Now.
Steph Judd: what do you think of some of the
Steph Judd: the the headline critiques that you'd have for people that you really want people to reconsider, as they speak about people with disability.
Steph Judd: that the
Steph Judd: the eschatological hope that they have. And then the the way that they think about their bodies.
Meghan Henning: For me, I think that
Meghan Henning: the
Meghan Henning: study of disability shows us that disability bodily difference is not good or bad.
Meghan Henning: It's neutral on any given day. My own experience of my disability can make my life more enriching better.
Meghan Henning: I happen to have a disability that
Meghan Henning: if it's very well with my job.
Meghan Henning: Hyper focus is why I
Meghan Henning: i'm good at doing research, and that's an onboarding feature of My, your divergent brain. Okay, that's not. That's not a bug. That's the that's the whole deal right? But
Meghan Henning: other days it's a pain in the ass.
Meghan Henning: and it's really difficult.
Meghan Henning: because I can't be the kind of mother teacher, scholar that I want to be when I am
Meghan Henning: not able to hyper focus where i'm trying to hyper focus on something else where i'm just exhausted because
Meghan Henning: neuro divergent life is sometimes very exhausting. So
Meghan Henning: that's just my own life. But that's a common narrative within the disability community right that our our bodies are different. But the great palace lie
Meghan Henning: is that everybody's bodies are supposed to be the same.
Meghan Henning: and that great palace. Why Doesn't just hurt
Meghan Henning: the bodies and experiences of the disabled? It hurts All of us
Meghan Henning: normals are out there really trying to like attain some ridiculous attain and maintain some ridiculous standard
Meghan Henning: that has you on a hamster wheel of bodily perfection.
Meghan Henning: And you're not just wearing yourselves out. You're wearing all of us out.
Meghan Henning: It's no good.
Meghan Henning: So that's what my research has really demonstrated for me is that yes, disability is different, culturally and in different times and places, and we have to be careful not to ascribe positive or negative value to it in any given place or time. And what the history of hell shows us
Meghan Henning: is that any cultures bodily norms can be leveraged against the people who inhabit that culture.
Meghan Henning: But we have to be so so careful
Meghan Henning: not to keep making that hell on earth.
John Anthony Dunne: Wow! That is, that is powerful. Thank you so much for that. And and Dr. Honey, thank you so much for your time and thank you for for joining us. What a mic drop moment to end us with! But we just really enjoyed this conversation. Really appreciate your work.
Meghan Henning: Thank you so much. It was really great to be with you both, and I really appreciate your insightful questions.