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What to do with idiots, imbeciles, cretins? If the reader isn't shocked by this opening query, something is seriously wrong. We have abandoned this language as we were once enjoined to abandon children—and adults—who got slotted into such categories. Every now and then one encounters a person who says Mongoloid idiot, even in polite company, but the effect is rather like bumping into a velociraptor on an evening stroll: Where did this extinct, unpleasant creature come from ?

Times change. And once in a while they change for the better. The seeds of decent treatment of those we call "exceptional" or, if we are being especially correct and perhaps a bit cutesy, "challenged," are of ancient and noble lineage .

It is awfully hard to square Christian understanding of the imago Dei—we are all God's creatures—with a ruthless or frightened determination to remove from our midst those among us who present themselves to us in bodies and with faces that don't fit some norm. But square it all too many did, perhaps thinking: Surely God couldn't have intended this! Surely this is a mistake! To be reminded of frailty and vulnerability and even brokenness in this way? Too much to bear. The human propensity to turn away from difficulties, whether conceptual, ethical, bodily, or social, kicks in, and we shun or dismiss or exile .

But it doesn't end there, for the roots of mistreatment of persons with disabilities lie not just in a turning away from one understanding at its richest (what I have called "Christian anthropology") but in embracing an alternative that embeds within it a rationale for discrimination of an invidious sort .

Consider the high premium the Enlightenment and rationalist philosophers placed on reason as the jewel in the anthropological crown: cogito ergo sum. This isn't Christian thinking—Christian philosophers did not privilege reason in this way—but it certainly is Western and came to dominate much of our thinking. Augustine, by way of contrast, had posed doubting as a defining criterion of our humanness, that and our very creatureliness that came in many varieties. Augustine's capacious anthropology quite readily incorporated under the definition "human "

the so-called Sciopods ("shadow-feet") because in hot weather they lie on their backs on the ground and take shelter in the shade of their feet. … What am I to say of the Cynocephali, whose dog's head and actual barking prove them to be animals rather than men? Now we are not bound to believe in the existence of all the types of men who are described. But no faithful Christian should doubt that anyone who is born anywhere as a man—that is, a rational and mortal being—derives from that one first-created human being. And this is true, however extraordinary such a creature may appear to our senses in bodily shape, in colour, or motion, or utterance, or in any natural endowment, or part, or quality.

A rational being Augustine defines as a creature capable of communicating with its fellows—and the doglike Cynocephali did that—but, first and foremost, a creature at once natal and mortal and aware of that fact: we are born of parents of the flesh and we die .

This didn't cut much ice with Descartes, who viewed the body as extended machinery inessential to who I am. Troubles aplenty for those who are manifestly different from birth lurk here. What are we to make of those who appear among us in bodies that are not only distinctive, as each human body is distinctive, but bodies that mark them for a life that will not be fully human on a narrowly rationalist and disembodied account of the human condition ?

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