more or less human

From Peter Leithart in Touchstone...

In his little book Altogether Gift: A Trinitarian Spirituality, Michael Downey suggests that we can learn things about being human from the mentally handicapped that we can’t learn from the healthy. Handicapped people are often entirely dependent, and have to bow at every moment to the direction of others.

It is easy for us who are free from mental handicaps to think that being human means being self-directed, rational, or independent. When we examine ourselves in the mirror of handicapped people – including fetuses – we realize that being human is less about standing tall than about receiving a gift....