Belonging, Disability, & Hospitality with Erik Freiburger

Belonging, Disability, & Hospitality with Erik Freiburger

From The Biggest Table by Andrew Camp | Lumivoz

May 19, 2026 · 1h 8m · Episode 67

About this episode

Andrew Camp interviews Erik Freiburger about the intersections of disability, belonging, and hospitality within the church context.

Host Andrew Camp interviews writer and theologian Erik Freiburger about disability, belonging, and hospitality. Erik, a wheelchair user since a 1994 spinal cord injury, describes how his understanding of the word “disabled” matured, and explores whether disability is blessing or curse, concluding it is both/and, shaped by social exclusion, ableism, and human limits. They discuss prejudice and “whitewashing” (“aren’t we all disabled?”), and how churches can treat disability as peripheral. Erik explains his pushback to a prior AI conversation, rooted in his wife Bonnie’s 2014 loss of swallowing and their house church’s struggle to practice Eucharist when she couldn’t eat, leading them to broaden hospitality beyond food toward relationship and communal belonging. He urges churches to create cultures of care, advocate for dignity by going with marginalized people, and let neighbors shape theology (“the room is my theology”). Erik shares painful church experiences, links exclusion to “disgust” and purity logics, and finds hope in disabled Christians’ perseverance. Erik Freiburger is a writer, theologian, creator, and storyteller whose work explores the intersections of disability…

People in this episode

Host: Andrew Camp

Guest: Erik Freiburger

Topics covered

  • disability
  • belonging
  • hospitality
  • church
  • ableism
  • community

Keywords

  • disability
  • belonging
  • hospitality
  • church
  • ableism
  • Eucharist
  • marginalized
  • community

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