Joni and Friends is an international disability ministry and advocacy group in Agoura Hills, Calif., founded in 1979 by Joni Eareckson Tada. It has a number of field service branches. Melany Ethridge handles media queries.

L’Arche is a faith-based residential community and movement founded in 1964 in France by Jean Vanier for people with developmental disabilities. L’Arche is now an international federation of communities. L’Arche came to the United States in 1972 and now has 18 American communities.

FaithNet of the National Alliance on Mental Illness is an outreach effort to religious communities to enhance understanding of the value of spirituality in responding to and recovering from mental illness.

The American Association of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities has a Religion and Spirituality Division. Its mission is to promote spiritual growth for people with developmental disabilities. Margaret Nygren is executive director and CEO.

Pamela Cushing is a cultural anthropologist who teaches sociology at King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario. She has studied the L’Arche community, which provides homes for people with intellectual disabilities. She has also written about caregiving, researched social inclusion of people with disabilities and studied the growth of disabilities studies programs in the English-speaking […]

John Swinton is a nurse, ordained minister and theologian who teaches at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He has written extensively on the theology of disability; his publications include Theology, Disability and the New Genetics: Why Science Needs the Church (as co-editor) and the article “The Body of Christ Has Down’s Syndrome: Theological Reflections on Disability, Vulnerability […]

Johannes S. “Hans” Reinders is the Bernard Lievegoed Professor of Ethics and Mental Disability at the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He co-chaired a 2007 interdisciplinary conference, “Learning From the Disabled,” that explored what people who have disabilities can teach those who are not impaired. His publications include The Future of the Disabled in Liberal […]

Xavier Le Pichon is a professor of geodynamics at the Collège de France in Aix-en-Provence. Internationally known for his work on plate tectonics, he founded with his wife the Thomas Philippe House (La Maison Thomas Philippe), a facility in southern France for families of people with intellectual disabilities. The house is named after the Rev. Thomas Philippe, mentor of […]

Bill Gaventa is associate professor of pediatrics at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and director of community and congregational supports at the Elizabeth M. Boggs Center on Developmental Disabilities in New Brunswick, N.J. Gaventa served 14 years as editor of the Journal of Religion, Disability & Health […]