Wow! “My Body Is Not A Prayer Request” is an insightful, humbling, and hopeful book. I feel privileged to take a look inside the heart and mind of a disabled person. I set aside my preconceived notions of disability and was met with beauty and wisdom I would have missed without reading this book. This quote is just too good to miss: “To assume that my disability needs to be erased in order for me to live an abundant life is disturbing not only because of what it says about me but also because of what it reveals about people’s notions of God. I bear the image of the Alpha and the Omega. My disabled body is a temple for the Holy Spirit. I have the mind of Christ. There’s no caveat to those promises. I don’t have a junior holy spirit because I am disabled. To suggest that I am anything less than sanctified and redeemed is to suppress the image of God in my disabled body and to limit how God is already at work through my life. Maybe we need to be freed not from disability but from the notion that it limits my ability to showcase God’s radiance to the church. What we need to be freed from is ableism.” Take the time to look into your own heart to see where these insidious lies might be showing up in your perception of the disabled. I know my heart and mind have been forever changed and a new set of eyes to see and honor the work and dignity of God within them

I highly recommend “My Body Is Not A Prayer Request” and hope you are able to read it and let the Holy Spirit convict, teach, and change you through Amy Kenny’s words.

I just reviewed My Body Is Not a Prayer Request by Amy Kenny. #MyBodyIsNotaPrayerRequest #NetGalley

Disability awareness doesn't get talked about nearly enough in Christian circles. Plenty of sermons touch on racism, sexism, and classism, but I honestly don't remember ever hearing one on ableism. Instead, many Christians and churches continue to perpetuate harmful ideas about disability and often exclude our disabled brothers and sisters from feeling truly included in church.

The author does an excellent job of breaking down exactly where the church has fallen short and how Christians can do better. As someone already fairly familiar with disability advocacy outside of the church, I'd never truly processed how many Christianese things contribute to ableism from common verse interpretations to song lyrics to other forms of outright exclusion. This book has challenged me to rethink how I personally can be a better advocate within the church.

This is an important book, and I'd recommend it to all Christians but especially to those unfamiliar with accessibility.

This was very well-written, and I hope to read more by this author in the future!

This was incredible. Amy Kenny has put an eloquent and powerful testimony of disability in the church out into the world. Through personal experience and scriptural references, she walks us through the everyday bias the disabled community faces in a space that claims to be welcoming and accommodating. I found a lot to improve on personally, as well as a lot of things in my local community that can be confronted. I will 100% be recommending this book.

From the second I saw this book's title and the brilliant and articulate woman who has authored it, I was eager to get my hands on it. Amy Kenny presents a term and explores a concept I've understood in my own life experience but not had words to attach to it: disability justice. I won't tell my husband's story, but he uses a wheelchair, and the all too frequent instances of glaring ignorance, intolerance, and inability to offer inclusivity have taught me a lot.

The author's writing skill combined with her timely and desperately needed message make this the best resource I've ever seen for those wishing to realign their thinking on disability. "I am what every athlete fears and what pregnant parents dread...People call my murderers 'merciful' because I am a burden and a drain and a waste. I am disabled."

Countless times I wanted to yell "EXACTLY" or "THANK YOU" or somehow beg....everyone to read this. She talks about how it is the way the world is structured that is disabling--and if there were ramps, for example, those using wheelchairs would be perfectly free instead of confined to only SOME buildings and barred from others (this is far more common than people who are not in wheelchairs realize).

All in all, a beautiful, powerful, essential book I cannot say enough good things about. Kenny's message to the world at large and the church in particular is decades overdue and exquisitely worded.

It's difficult to describe the experience of reading Amy Kenny's "My Body Is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church," a book that I read both as a reviewer of literary efforts and as a disabled Christian and ordained minister who experienced the book as somewhat of a primal scream that uncompromisingly calls forth disability justice in the church that so often recognizes or dismisses disability and the disabled as less than, suffering, consequences of the fall, and/or all of the above.

Kenny, who obtained her PhD from the University of Sussex, is a a disabled scholar whose research focuses on medical and bodily themes in literature. Expertly weaving together personal testimony and experiences with biblical exegesis, Kenny has crafted a book that called out my own internal and externalized ableism, called me into action, made me laugh, made me shout, made me cry, and with her closing three words, which I won't share here, left me in tears and realizing how so very little I hear these words that are so fundamental to the human experience.

As I read "My Body Is Not a Prayer Request," I began exploring my own life growing up in the church with spina bifida and experiencing a lifetime of well over 50 inpatient surgeries alone along with multiple amputations, paraplegia, a brain injury, and a myriad of other health complications that have often left me doubting my place in the church yet, somehow, never doubting my faith.

I agree with Lisa Sharon Harper, as I usually do, who declared "My Body Is Not a Prayer Request" to be holy ground, Kenny's one that writes with both love and rage knowing that we worship a disabled God whose wounds survived resurrection. With remarkable vulnerability, Kenny shares her own experiences inside churches, healthcare, and other settings and the institutionalized ableist beliefs and practices that we, those with disabilities, are simply supposed to set aside either because things don't change or because those who practice them at least mean well.

Meaning well isn't enough.

As one reads Kenny's experiences alongside her tremendous accomplishments both personal and professional, it is impossible to not feel empowered and encouraged by "My Body Is Not a Prayer Request." She inspires, not in the way labeled "inspiration porn" by the late activist Stella Young, but in the way that recognizes the tremendous heart and soul work Kenny has put into living into her own voice even while surrounded by ableism in every day life.

As if her own testimony and biblical exegesis aren't enough, Kenny infuses "My Body Is Not a Prayer Request" with tremendous applicability including beautifully constructed points of reflection and pointed top-ten lists at the end of each of the book's chapters.

There is much to love about "My Body Is Not a Prayer Request" and there's simply no question it will be among my favorite books of 2022, both because it is incredibly written and because my own life experienced felt baptized by Kenny's words.

"My Body Is Not a Prayer Request" is a must-read for pastors old and new and should be required reading for seminarians everywhere. For anyone who works with or on behalf of individuals with disabilities, "My Body Is Not a Prayer Request" should serve as a necessary introduction into disability justice and creating more inclusion in church and parachurch spaces.

My favorite books are those books that change who I am as a human being and as a person of faith. While I have lived as a disabled person of faith for my over 50 years of life, I have long waited for a book such as "My Body Is Not a Prayer Request."

Finally, it has arrived. For that, and for the ministry of Amy Kenny I do give thanks.

As I read this book, I was shocked that I hadn't read it or something like it sooner. I'm seminary-educated and this book felt like a book I should have read in seminary. Interweaving pieces and stories of her own life with strong and well-centered theological work, Dr. Kenny has crafted a very important theological text that explores the way the Church often fails those with disabilities (both seen and unseen) in our congregations. However, she also does the hard and crucial work of providing a roadmap for those of us in the Church who see and believe her experiences and who have the prophetic imagination to imagine a Church that doesn't act in those ways. I think this book will be a valuable resource to anyone looking to figure out what it might look like to better act in love to those who are disabled in our worship communities.