Posted by Helen on: 07.12.2007 /
I wanted to post a follow-up to my post last week about Laughing at people.
In it I mentioned the article Summer Camps for Atheists by Stan Guthrie.
I e-mailed Stan expressing my concerns about the article as well as mentioning them here. In retrospect I had a lot of presuppositions about Stan. I thought he either wouldn’t respond, or he’d send me one e-mail telling me that what he posted was perfectly fine and reasonable.
In fact he did write back, more than once and we ended up having a very friendly e-mail exchange.
My other presupposition was: Stan is a white American (probably heterosexual, since he’s an evangelical Christian) male. Maybe he doesn’t know anything about being stigmatized or dealing with things other people don’t really understand - maybe he doesn’t ‘get’ it.
But when I raised this issue with him, he shared with me that he has a physical disability. So I was wrong about that too. Stan didn’t specify what his disability was. I was curious but didn’t ask because I figured he would have told me if he wanted to.
I was looking at Christianity Today’s site yesterday and saw there was a new column up by Stan. I looked out of curiosity and it turned out to centrally reference his disability. It significantly affects how he walks, hence the title: Stumbling after Jesus.
All this reminds me to be careful not to prejudge people. I try not to, but evidently I am still quite prone to it.
(One final note: I was interested to discover that at the same time I was writing to Stan, Siamang was engaging another Christian in dialog, also because of his comments about Camp Quest)