RIP: Nancy Eiesland (1964-2009)

[Image: a black-and-white portrait of Nancy Eiesland, from her faculty webpage]

Sad news: Nancy Eiesland of Emory University has died this week, from cancer. If you're interested in how disability studies scholarship might inform the sociology of religion, you won't get far without running into some of Nancy Eiesland's work, especially The Disabled God (Abingdon Press 1994) and Human Disability and the Service of God (an edited collection, Abingdon Press 1998).

Eiesland wrote last year in a campus publication about her lifelong experiences with surgeries and pain and medication, noting "for most of us, pain will be an ordinary partner in an ordinary life." Her colleague and friend Christian Scharen has this remembrance. According to the Facebook group "Friends of Nancy Eiesland," a memorial service is being planned for the afternoon of March 22, in Cannon Chapel on campus.