United Church of Christ Disabilities Ministries » 2007 » February
In January 2008, the Chicago Theological Seminary will be offering a course by Craig Modahl called “Theology, Ministry and People with Developmental Disabilities.†This course will explore the multiple issues facing people with developmental disabilities. Central to the course will be the implications for ministry on the part of religious leaders and their communities. For more, visit Craig’s Comments (#6) on Seminaries and Seminarians in the Networking category of this web site.
A Nebraska Conference RECORD focus issue about Disabilities Ministries
This issue of The Nebraska RECORD shares delightful stories about tangible and architectural changes reported recently by United Churches of Christ from Omaha to Chadron and Lincoln to Ogallala. These stories — set in larger, 12-point type – tell of changes which vary in levels of magnitude, yet they all have equal weight. They are concrete evidence of attitudinal change.
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“Everybody has a right to learn through their eyes or their ears,” Robyn Weber said. “I am here as a tool to help one person understand.”
Monday, February 5, 2007
By Christopher Claire
A RULING by Switzerland’s highest court has opened up the possibility
that people with serious mental illnesses could be helped by doctors to
take their own lives.
Switzerland already allows doctor-assisted suicide for terminally ill
patients under certain circumstances. The Federal Tribunal’s decision
puts mental illnesses on the same level as physical ones.
The move has been labelled as “dangerous” as it could lead to a rapid
rise in the number of people travelling to Switzerland for assisted
suicide.
The latest figures show 54 Britons travelled to Zurich’s Dignitas Clinic
to end their lives in the past four years.
“It must be recognised that an incurable, permanent, serious mental
disorder can cause similar suffering as a physical [disorder], making
life appear unbearable to the patient in the long term,” the ruling
said.
“If the death wish is based on an autonomous decision which takes all
circumstances into account, then a mentally ill person can be prescribed
sodium-pentobarbital and thereby assisted in suicide,”
it added.
Various organisations exist in Switzerland to help people who want to
commit suicide, and helping someone to die is not punishable under Swiss
law as long as there is no “selfish motivation” for doing so.
In their ruling the judges made it clear certain conditions would have
to be met before a mentally ill person’s request for suicide assistance
could be considered justified: “A distinction has to be made between a
death wish which is an expression of a curable, psychiatric disorder and
which requires treatment, and [a death wish] which is based on a person
of sound judgment’s own well- considered and permanent decision, which
must be respected.”
The case was brought by a 53-year-old man with serious bipolar affective
disorder who asked the tribunal to allow him to acquire a lethal dose of
pentobarbital without a doctor’s prescription.
The tribunal ruled against his request, confirming the need for a
thorough medical assessment of his condition.
Whether any Swiss physician would be prepared to prescribe a lethal dose
of pentobarbital to a mentally ill person remains unclear. One
internationally renowned expert on medical ethics said such a policy
would be both difficult to enforce and dangerous to apply.
“Assisted suicide has always been linked to the challenge of allowing
the terminally ill a choice in managing their inevitable death,” said Dr
Arthur Caplan, chairman of the Department of Medical Ethics at the
University of Pennsylvania. “Linking the right to assistance in dying to
the quality of someone’s life or their suffering is an enormous and, in
my view, very dangerous shift in legal and ethical thinking about
assisted suicide.”
Caplan said the policy could lead to a “very slippery slope”, opening
the door to anyone who claims to have unbearable psychological or
emotional suffering to request help in dying:
people with terrible burns, those who are severely disfigured, those who
are emotionally bereft at the loss of a child or partner, and even those
suffering from career failures.
“This is an incredibly controversial decision,” he said. “Is the
doctor’s mission to eliminate difficult and horrendous human suffering
by helping people to die?”
Elsbeth Chowdharay-Best, honorary secretary of Alert, an anti-
euthanasia organisation set up to warn people of the dangers of any type
of euthanasia legislation and pro-death initiatives,
said: “I think this is a horrifying development. It takes one back to
the Nazi era, when people with disabilities were considered disposable.”
Switzerland is one of a number of countries in Europe that allow
assistance to terminally ill people who wish to die.
The Netherlands legalised euthanasia in 2001 and Belgium did in 2002,
while Britain and France allow terminally ill people to refuse treatment
in favour of death.
Source: The Scotsman
news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=183882007
________________________________________________________________
For more bioethical news issues, see:
www.aapd.com/News/bioethics/indexbioethics.php
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“Snapshots” of the Adventures In Community Camp, Outdoor Ministries shared by the Disciples of Christ and the United Church of Christ in Burwell, Nebraska.
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The other day, as my dog guide and I walked to the mail drop box, we passed three playing children. One piped up, “Are you the blind lady?”
Ignoring an older girl’s attempt to shush him, I said, “Yes, I’m blind, and I’m left-handed, too.”
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All three of us, each with a unique ministry, have been accepted here for who we are “inside.” My heart rejoices in this gift from a generous God to be sent to this church.
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Sometimes it takes awhile for the hyphen to disappear. Two words expressing a unit idea first accept a hyphen then release it to form a compound word. Basket and ball were once separate words that became basket-ball, then basketball.
At a wedding dinner, the curiosity of a young boy prompted him to pull up a chair. He was full of wanting to hear about my dog guide, I thought.
After some dog talk, he paused. “Then, you’re not afraid of the dark,” he said with the relieved voice of one who might be. “I’m not afraid of the dark with Leader Dog Treasure,” I said, Both of us knew we had gotten rid of the hyphen, and he went off with a friend.
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What are other Conference and Association Accessibility Committees doing?
I have been chairing this committee now since 1991. Shortly after the ADA was signed in 1990, there were a number of multi-state conferences sponsored by UCC to begin to look at the role of our churches in light of the ADA. I went to one of those conferences, and came back to NH recommending that NH should have a group to deal with these issues.
Over the years, our membership has fluctuated; however we have not lost sight of our goal. We began as a task force, and after we wrote our mission statement, we became a committee attached to one of the conference commissiions. The conference has been very supportive of our work. When our conference was building its new office building, they turned to our committee for advice re: accessibility.
Since the new A2A curriculum came out, our committee has been presenting it at our annual conference meeting as well as at a “Prepared to Serve” Conference. Although attendance is low (5-8) people at a time , the response has been favorable. I have NO clue as to how many Churches are actually using the curriculum.
Joyce Beairsto at joyharts@yahoo.com
About elevators and chair lifts in places of worship.
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The genesis point of our religion is God’s looking at each creature and seeing, first, that it is good. We also, as open, accepting churches, need not start with what is wrong with a person but from the beginning can choose to affirm what is right.
“If more people educated themselves about mental illness, maybe they could understand it is an illness of the brain, not a character defect or something that I, or anyone else who suffers from it, can just stop whenever it is inconvenient,” says Lincolnite Sheri Riley.
Read Papolos’ The Bipolar Child, Granet’s Why Am I Up, Why Am I Down? and other nonfiction resources by Miklowitz, Mondimore, and Waltz. Explore the Nebraska chapter of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill at www.nami.org.
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