Accompanying Disability: Caretaking, Family, and Faith - AUTHOR: Topher Endress

REVIEWED BY Mychal B. Springer

Abstract

Topher Endress situates his book Accompanying Disability in the world of disability
theology while carving out a new sphere: “accompaniment theology” (p. 4). The book
integrates the voice of Topher’s father, John Endress, throughout. John tells his own story
of his hiking accident and his life afterwards, living with quadriplegia. Topher’s and
John’s interpolated chapters model that the disabled person and the caregiver are distinct
and interconnected and each person’s experience should be honored. “To accompany is
to participate in the Spirit in a process of becoming something you were not, and that
shift functions to give this book a thoroughly theological focus” (pp. 26–27). For Endress,
the one body with many parts that Paul speaks of in First Corinthians, means that caring
for a person with disabilities is intrinsically part of who that caregiver is.