Erin Raffety will be presented with the 2024 Reimagining Spirituality Leadership Award by the Religion and Spirituality Interest Network of AAIDD at the Network Forum on June 10, 2023.
We are pleased to announce Rev. Dr. Erin Raffety as the 2024 recipient of the Reimagining Spirituality Leadership Award! This award recognizes the creative ways she has promoted opportunities for people with disabilities for personal spiritual growth, developing enriching relationships, and participating in spiritual or religious community.
Rev. Dr. Erin Raffety is a Practical Theologian who uses ethnographic methods to study Christian congregations and communities. Raffety is currently a Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program where she teaches on disability justice. She is ordained as a Teaching Elder in the PC(USA), holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology, is a proud parent of a daughter with multiple disabilities, and a disability advocate.
At Princeton Theological Seminary, Raffety serves as the Senior Researcher on the Isaiah Partnership, the Empirical Research Consultant on the Imagining Church, and the Associate Research Scholar for the Institute for Youth Ministry. She is also currently the Scholar-in-Residence for the Missing Voices 2.0 grant at Flagler College that is working to develop practical and scholarly resources for youth workers in ministry with disabled youth (2023-2025). From 2020-2023, she served as a Research Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry, where she built and studied a Minecraft video game for disabled Christians and their congregations, and conducted a study on worship access for Christians living with Long COVID and chronic illness.
She is also the author of two books, one on disability ministry in the United States, From Inclusion to Justice (Baylor, Sept 1, 2022), and the other on disability and foster care in China, Families We Need (Rutgers, Nov 11, 2022), as well as numerous academic and popular articles.
AAIDD Religion & Spirituality Network 