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Spirit and Trauma
Abstract
Life following an overwhelming event of violence is fundamentally changed. Survivors struggle to reconcile their present experience of lifereconfigured through traumawith their experience of faith. When individuals and religious communities try to put the events behind them and proclaim the good news before its time, they fail to attend to the ongoing realities of a death that do not go away. This essay explores a theology that witnesses to what remains.
... Micah 4:1-5 and a Judean Experience of Trauma 59 well as to reconsider the central theological perspectives they offer. 35 Although it has become evident from the above discussion that the concept of trauma is commonplace in many different contexts, the "use of trauma theory in the field of biblical studies is still in its infancy". 36 In the late 1990s and early 2000s Old Testament scholars once again focused on the Babylonian exile and especially on the impact it had on the people of Judah. ...
One should not underestimate the impact suffering has on a community. Therefore in biblical studies we are aware, more than ever before, of the impact traumatic events had on individuals and groups. Trauma studies have become an important part of the textual analysis as the exegete turns to potential markers of trauma in the literary prophecy of the HB. The aim of this article is, first of all, to give an overview of the development of trauma studies, as well the influence trauma studies had on Biblical Studies. Secondly, this article will reflect on trauma and experiences of trauma - especially collective trauma of a community - as portrayed in the book of Micah. This is illustrated by an analysis of Micah 4:1-5, a pericope that is part of a biblical book that seems to accentuate that restoration and transformation can only take place after judgement.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, studies on “cultural trauma” have pushed Hebrew Bible exegesis in new directions. Although its initial focus was on the period of the Babylonian exile (6th century BC), after 25 years of research, this novel framework has shown its fruitfulness when reading a range of literature: poetic and prophetic literature, as well as narratives of sexual violence. Trauma studies also engage an inspiring dialogue with other disciplines that are already well established in biblical exegesis, such as feminist scholarship. The aim of this article is twofold: on the one hand, we will introduce the concept of “cultural trauma” and the main features that characterise the narratives responding to cultural trauma. On the other hand, we will present the main contributions of this frame of reference to recent Hebrew Bible research and the concrete contributions to a text as disturbing as the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter in Judges 11:29–40.
“Moral shocks” are unexpected events or pieces of information that so deeply challenge one’s basic values and sense of the world that they profoundly reorient a person’s understanding of life and even self. Yet those who experience significant moral shocks rarely participate in related activism and instead experience grief as highly privatized and apolitical, a reality that serves the status quo and most powerful. This article considers how religious resources can help metabolize private grief into public lament and catalyze political grievance. Analyzing the rise of gun control activism after an elementary school mass shooting in Nashville, Tennessee, I argue religious resources help metabolize moral shocks into social change in five significant ways: (1) cultivating practiced, purposeful pathos, (2) offering collective lament, (3) building networked resiliency materially and theologically, (4) risking new alliances of accompaniment, and (5) storying hope. This case analysis contributes to a broader claim for political theology: Christianity can be understood as a movement based on a moral shock. This framing then animates practices of care to accompany those in moral distress and help disciple grief into a movement of faith that resists death-dealing political and social policy.
When religion is the site of abuse and trauma, it can deeply impact a person's ability to relate to God and engage in spiritual practice. As such, religious trauma is ripe for philosophical exploration. Section 1 of this Element provides a brief history of the concept of psychological trauma, contemporary accounts of its neurobiological basis, and its impact on human agency. Section 2 sketches a model of religious trauma through the first-person narratives of survivors and emerging psychological data. Section 3 explores the social epistemology of religious trauma, focusing on how failures of knowledge create space for religious abuse and the insights of survivors may help communities guard against it. The last two sections consider three perennial topics in philosophy of religion from the perspective of religious trauma: the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness, and religious experience.
In this article, I propose a collaborative preaching model for healing collective trauma. It begins with the preaching context of a society in the grip of collective trauma after a traumatic event. Taking the May 1998 tragedy in Jakarta, Indonesia, as a case study and employing descriptive, historical, and analytical methods, this study argues that the Church is called to respond to collective trauma in its ministries as part of God’s mission. The research focuses specifically on the ministry of preaching and explores theories of trauma-aware preaching to affirm that preaching can indeed be a medium for healing collective trauma. I then present a collaborative preaching model for collective trauma healing by integrating a conversational preaching approach with the local Indonesian traditions of gotong-royong and musyawarah-mufakat.
This chapter contains a discussion of the results of the data analysis in the previous chapter. In the first part, I will interpret the data from the perspective of Johann Baptist Metz’s concept of dangerous memory. This concept served as the main sensitizing concept in the data analysis; that is, it helped identify meaningful aspects in the interviews collected for this study. As shown below, the concept represents a plausible starting point for understanding the meaning of the memory of Marielle Franco in the present, but there are also limits to the concept. For this reason, I will also explore new ways of interpreting the memory of Franco that go beyond Metz. My reading of the memory of Franco in this chapter will form the basis for a decolonial understanding of dangerous memory in Chap. 5.
The COVID-19 pandemic proved challenging and traumatic for many, with its effects still being felt four years later. This article contends that the witness of Jesus of Nazareth and the early Christian communities can serve as guides for navigating post-pandemic life. This article will do so by examining the historical context of first-century Jewish Palestine with attention given to the Roman Empire’s brutality and traumatizing impact. It will then provide an analysis of the Matthean Jesus’ call to love one’s enemies and the Markan Jesus’ emphasis on bearing the cross as constructive responses to the trauma Matthew and Mark’s communities went through. Lastly, it will show how Jesus and the early Christian communities reveal that pain and trauma can be healthily transcended for better ways and behaviors. Thus, what has happened to us, however painful, can bear the seeds of a healthy purpose and meaning that can lead to us and our world becoming more humanized. The research methodology in this article is interdisciplinary, employing biblical theological, historical, and psychological methodologies.
The Gospel of John, without having its own liturgical year, is typically assumed to have a supplemental homiletical role in the Revised Common Lectionary, and yet the Fourth Gospel is the designated Gospel reading for the festival Sundays of Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and Easter season. As a result, the theological themes of the Fourth Gospel anchor the church’s Trinitarian confessions and doctrinal imagination when it comes to preaching. In particular, as the assigned Gospel for the Sundays of Easter, the Gospel of John shapes resurrection proclamation. Resurrection proclamation, therefore, is animated by Jesus’ final words to his disciples found in the Farewell Discourse (John 14–17), where Jesus interprets his own ministry, commissions his disciples, testifies to the Paraclete, and prays for his followers. This essay will explore how the viewpoint of Jesus’ departing declarations makes a difference for preaching the resurrection. Through the lens of the Farewell Discourse, the promise of the resurrection takes on thematic issues that give important meaning to Jesus’ own revelation, “I am the resurrection and the life”.
Can emotional wounds heal? Pastoral theories generally have shown that it is possible to engage the complexity of emotional wounds problem. Some of it can be found in Clebsch and Jaekle’s pastoral functions and in crisis intervention methodology that presents the achievable result of responding to the counselee’s emotional wounds. However, what about the wounds that remain? Drawing from the author's accompanying research on the traumatic reality wounds that remain irreconcilable, the author offers a new way of pastoral care that responds to these wounds that remain. The posture of accepting the wounds that remain as a way of healing, would be central here. By using qualitative research methods, the author presents the ABCA crisis intervention method as a way of pastoral care that includes this posture as a way of healing. This method is relevant in that it answers the problem of the remaining wound through inviting the counselee to remember their past, reaffirming their present, and reauthoring their future as a way of healing.Abstrak. Apakah luka batin bisa sembuh? Teori-teori pastoral secara umum mengatakan bahwa kompleksitas permasalahan terkait luka batin dapat dijawab. Beberapa di antaranya dapat ditemukan dalam fungsi-fungsi pastoral menurut Clebsch dan Jaekle dan metodologi intervensi krisis yang memperlihatkan tercapainya kesembuhan dalam merespons luka batin konseli. Akan tetapi, bagaimana dengan luka yang tidak hilang? Berangkat dari penelitian dampingan penulis atas luka traumatis yang tidak kunjung hilang sekaligus tidak dapat diperdamaikan, penulis menawarkan sebuah cara baru pendampingan pastoral dalam merespons luka batin yang tidak hilang. Sikap penerimaan realitas luka yang masih ada sebagai wujud kesembuhan, menjadi penting dibahas. Dengan menggunakan metode penelitian kualitatif, penulis menawarkan metode intervensi krisis ABCA sebagai bentuk pendampingan pastoral yang mengikutsertakan sikap menerima tersebut sebagai bentuk kesembuhan. Metode ini menjadi relevan karena ia menjawab permasalahan realitas luka yang tidak dapat diperdamaikan tersebut dengan mengajak konseli untuk mengingat kembali pada masa lalunya, menegaskan kembali pada masa kininya, dan menarasikannya untuk masa depan sebagai wujud kesembuhannya.
This article discusses an inherent paradox in contemporary conceptualisations of community as a challenge to diaconia. Logics of protection separate insiders from outsiders, producing a fundamental antagonism between those who belong to the community and those who threaten it. During pandemics, this logic is exacerbated. When contagion threatens all, even the community needs to be protected from itself. Immunitarian defences are required for the safety of all community members. However, measures implemented to ensure immunity can also harm people’s mental and somatic health. This paradox presents ethical and practical challenges for inclusive justice, including diaconia. Concerning this dilemma, the article draws on Roberto Esposito’s reframing of community and immunitarian defence. Esposito argues that immunitarian mechanisms must promote tolerance of otherness through openness to its presence within. I suggest that this openness can be seen as a fundamental ontological vulnerability shared by all living creatures. Learning from recent contributions within vulnerability studies and feminist and trauma theologies, I employ Tony Addy’s concept of conviviality as a model for diaconal community building, seeking to elucidate the relevance of Esposito’s thinking to postpandemic diaconal practice.
This article argues that han should be received as an intercultural anthropology into global theological discourse, provides insight into some of the nuances of this anthropology, and shows the benefits of a thorough engagement with han. It suggests han anthropology be received as “intercultural” as opposed to “cross-cultural” or “trans-cultural.” The article then provides a brief overview of the development of han as a local anthropology of the Korean people and then interprets han using the work of Hwa-Young Chong and the philosophy of Jae-Hoon Lee to focus on han’s various manifestations—original and secondary—as well as won-han, jeong-han, and especially hu-han. It explains han’s ambiguous relationality, its potential for negative and positive transformation of life and society, its evocation of woundedness beyond “trauma,” and its deep connection to religion and ritual. I conclude that han continues to offer a rich and under-utilized resource for articulating Christian soteriologies between global and local that prioritize the “sinned-against.”
The analysis of religious trauma is enriched by considering how it may be produced by formation in chronic shame. The testimony of those who have experienced religious trauma and severe religious shame is essential to interdisciplinary understanding of and response to this harm. The experiences of those harmed indicates that some traditional Christian doctrinal interpretations are shaming. Thus, the potential for Christian communities to create climates of chronic shame and cause religious trauma is present wherever such theological interpretations dominate. In this way, the religious teachings themselves, especially when communicated in chronically shaming environments, are traumatizing. In this approach, Christian religious trauma is not an added element to traumas of domestic, physical, or sexual abuse by a religious person or leader. Instead, the source of the trauma is formative experience of participating in Christianity. Religious trauma merits interdisciplinary study in Religious Studies and trauma studies, as well as Christian theology. Theological response to Christian religious trauma contributes to this interdisciplinary need.
This article analyzes the experience of foster children through the lens of four frameworks: attachment theory, systemic intersectional oppression, posttraumatic stress disorder, and silencing. These frameworks all illustrate the way in which foster children live in an environment of ‘tenuous connections.’ This article also proposes that COVID-19 has further exacerbated these tenuous connections and that while pastoral caregivers are capable of playing an essential role in providing stability and safety to foster children, it may be difficult for them to do so, due to the inherent instability of foster children's lives.
Suffering in the ecological realm exhibits structural parallels with diagnoses of human trauma. Viewing ecological suffering as traumatic allows for recent work in trauma theology to be applied in an ecological context. This article focusses specifically on the breakdown of communication that characterises traumatic events. In the ecological case, this is often a human failure to attend to suffering in the rest of the ecosphere. What is required is a witness to this ecological trauma. Following Shelly Rambo, such witnessing is not about proclamation or imitation, but rather entails simply remaining with the suffering. For Christians, Christ can be one such witness. In his life and his death, he bears witness to the traumas of the earth—especially in his refusal to abandon our wounded world at the crucifixion. And this Christic witnessing provides a blueprint for our own, practical response: not imitating the self-sacrifice, but following the witness. One, tangible example of this is given by the Stations of the Forests resource. Here, the fourteen stations of the cross are recast as a witness to the traumas of contemporary deforestation. Resources like this illustrate how a model of Christic witnessing can constitute a practical response to ecological trauma.
The position of women and children in ancient times and today was/is never promising, because they are too often exposed to suffering, hunger, high levels of violence, abandonment, homelessness, and death. Often when the word for ‘child (olale/teknon)’ appears, violence and suffering are surrounding them. Thus, scholars regard 2 Kings 6:24-31 as a juvenile text of terror and a cannibal text of the Old Testament, contra to a text for example Mark 7:24-30 in the New Testament. In dealing with these texts, male-centred and adult-centred biblical interpretive approaches are mostly utilized. These interpretive approaches judged and blamed women as ‘murderers’ who ‘feed on their children’ rather than seeing the women as victims of a highly patriarchal society. Therefore, there is a need to read these texts through the ‘lenses’ of mothers and children. Biblical trauma hermeneutics, employing the ‘lens’ of trauma, will be utilised to interpret these biblical texts. This biblical trauma approach has a purpose for survival, recovery, and resilience to those suffering in and outside the context of the text. This paper seeks to reread and re-interpret 2 Kings 6:24-31 from a gender-childist-trauma perspective considering the manifold stories of abandoned children in South Africa.
“Lot’s wife looked back”. This detail in the migration journey of Lot and his family illustrates being caught in between needing to move forward but wanting to look back. Many adolescents who have migrated to Europe experience in-betweenness. This article begins from their reported practices of lived religion. This interpretive phenomenological analysis study brings together the domains of lived religion, migration theology, and adolescent development to better understand how pastoral care may address this liminal state. Looking at their descriptions of the presence and absence of important relationships, religious practices, and the experience of the divine shows the importance of these three areas working together. In the absence of strong proximal social relationships, many adolescents with a religious identity who have migrated to Europe turn their attention to the divine Godself. Releasing someone caught in between two places may require an awareness of the concepts of grief and loss, post-trauma theology, and skills in orienting and making social connections. One goal of pastoral care for adolescents who have experienced migration can be to provide a path out of the liminal in-between space to a place where there is room to flourish.
When caring for healthcare patients, professional chaplains may find an increasing proportion of individuals in the U.S. who do not identify as religious and who may benefit from creative approaches to discussing their spiritual and existential concerns. One approach to engaging patients is using a “third voice,” as shared in a personal narrative in which a chaplain uses landscape photographs to engage a patient for discussion of spiritual and existential concerns. The content of the conversation may inform decisions about treatment, quality of life, and person-centered care.
This paper arises from a pilot project of the Council for World Mission (CWM) that is seeking to explore the Legacies of Slavery via the archives of the London Missionary Society, the forerunners of CWM. Arguments around the justification of European Christian Mission often focus on the efficacy and utilitarianism of missionary activity, in terms of education, medicine or the removal unethical indigenous religio-cultural practices. This paper seeks to move beyond these justifications to focus on the representational damage imposed on the descendants of enslaved Africans that have traduced Black bodies to “less than” in the body politic of many Western nations in the global North. The denigration of Black bodies has continued beyond the epoch of slavery and finds expression in the absurdity of Black people needing to assert that “Black Lives Matter”.
Written from a standpoint of religious ethics, this article interprets the work of trauma response and recovery in transcendent and moral terms not always apparent to the practitioner or institution. This article provides a broad understanding of spirituality, transcendence, and faith as these concepts relate to Judith Herman’s stages of trauma healing and the characteristics of trauma-informed response articulated by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. These features are then mapped onto specific modes of transcendence and moral themes identifiable in a wide range of religious traditions. The connective framework for this mapping is provided by utilizing the concept “bearing witness,” as synthesized from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, to describe the work of trauma-informed response. This article concludes by recognizing bearing witness as a form of social action, a moral response with implied if not explicit religious dimensions and spiritual implications, for which an understanding of religious ethics is a helpful ally. Thus, this article concludes that religious ethics can be a valuable resource and partner in addressing the personal, systemic, and political aspects of trauma response and recovery, enabling attention to spiritual well-being of both the trauma survivor and the one responding to the survivor.
In this essay, I recount the recent narrative of an evangelical awakening on issues of sexual violence though the impact of Rachael Denhollander, an advocate and survivor of sexual trauma. Denhollander’s evangelical credentials authorized fellow US evangelicals to sympathize with the #MeToo movement. I then show how this script of awakening obscures a long history of abuse in relation to LGBTQ persons of faith. I demonstrate how American evangelical sex manuals make abuse both constitutive to a genuine discovery of personhood and simultaneously marginal to one’s self-identification. Paradox becomes a framework for describing the “problem” of homosexuality in evangelical circles. Finally, I reflect on what it suggests to scholars of religion that a religious community ensconces abuse in this distinctive way.
This study contends that preaching in a time of crisis, such as the global pandemic, demands homiletical models that enable speech about God which can address the questions of God’s character and activity that are raised by great tragedy and disruption. A sample set of sermons, from churches of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, preached during the first United Kingdom wide national lockdown are reviewed as to what they say about God in relation to the pandemic. A model for crisis preaching as apophatic discourse is presented and then the central process of ‘saying and unsaying’ is applied to one of the more theocentric sample sermons in order to evaluate the potential effectiveness of the proposal.
This article is a methodological experiment in ‘live’ theology. It reflects on the difficulty of creating theological meaning in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Drawing on trauma theology, disability theology, and autoethnographic reflections, we explore a particular “double bind” between silence and speech. While hurried speech can foreclose meaning and cause deep damage in the midst of unfolding trauma, theological silence risks concealing existing injustices that have been intensified by COVID-19. As such, we focus on intersections of race, class, poverty, disability, and legal status. Examining the tensions between overwork and inactivity in pandemic time, we consider dislocated time as resistance to hasty solutions, the rush towards resurrection hope, and modes of redemptive productivity. We confront the desires of practical theology to be found useful in times of trauma, and instead point towards theological practices of fragmented speech and remaining in dislocated time.
This article promotes a wider understanding of trauma-informed pedagogy for the higher education classroom, whether in-person or virtual, focusing on undergraduate and graduate teaching in religious studies and theological education. Trauma is not confined to individual experiences of single horrifying events—trauma can be collective (community-wide, e.g., COVID-19), epigenetic (inherited or intergenerational), social-cultural (e.g., racism), or vicarious. Drawing on religious education literature and recent insights from psychology, neuroscience, and public health studies, this article provides a shared basis for further development of trauma-informed pedagogy by religious and theological educators. A principle feature of this article is bibliographic, portraying the state of scholarship at the intersection of religious education and trauma and pointing to resources necessary for further development. It offers a brief survey of extant literature, presents a basic definition and description of trauma, introduces the features of a trauma-informed community approach, and discusses the core values guiding trauma-informed pedagogy. The article also explores religious aspects of trauma and discusses care for instructors, who deal with their own traumatic pasts as well as the secondary effects of encountering, teaching, and supporting traumatized individuals in the religious education classroom. This article concludes with a call for further research.
Pastors serving as military chaplains have been an integral part of the Swedish Armed Forces for hundreds of years. This close relationship has continued even after the Church of Sweden was formally separated from the state in 2000. Yet contemporary research drawing from experiences of Swedish military chaplains during their pastoral and spiritual assignments within a military context is virtually non-existent. This research explores the contemporary situation for military chaplaincy in Sweden through the lenses of proportional accessibility for military personnel, availability to civilian congregations, increasing cultural and ethnic diversity, religious embeddedness in military culture, theological tension, and personal identity development among chaplains. It furthermore suggests that military chaplains navigate a complex situation: they are expected to serve professional service members, many of whom have war zone experiences, in addition to shepherding increasing volumes of conscripts now that conscription has been reinstated, all within a new interreligious paradigm.
This paper argues that educational communities of faith and learning (e.g. Catholic colleges and universities) are especially primed to face into the pain and reality of the sex abuse crisis in honest and constructive ways. Citing the need for strategic collaboration between mental health professionals and religious educators, it calls for pedagogies which: are trauma-informed and utilize the insights of neuroscience; promote open dialogue in the face of organizational silence; foster safe and courageous spaces; attend to the dangerous memory and deep impacts which accompany survivors of the sex abuse. It argues that failure to address the sex abuse crisis with open and interdisciplinary discourse fosters a null curriculum that will only serve to have corrosive implications.
The somatic effects of empire can be found in Tim Winton’s “pneumatic materialism”, an aesthetic preoccupation in his novels with moments of anoxia, or the deprivation of oxygen to the brain. This essay will consider how Winton's novel engage with pneumatic materialism in response to questions of uneven development traditionally associated with the Global South, thereby disrupting clear South–North distinctions. By blurring his concerns across the North–South divide, Winton shows a willingness to think of empire as a series of relations that are not bound by national or territorial borders so much as by substances in the air. He does this, I argue, in his use of the breath.
This paper describes my journey as a hospice chaplain, from being out of my depth, in awkward silences, to embracing deep silences, as the locus of the sacred. By recovering the original vision of hospice pioneers, by embracing spiritual artistry and by discovering an innovative methodology – spiritual autoethnography – I uncover silences. Silences – traumatic, shameful, communicative, of betrayal and in grief – are prevalent in hospices, yet rarely spoken of. New insights from the spiritual tradition enables me to no longer see silences solely as a litany of losses, or as an absence, something to be fearful of. Rather the key learning is that threshold silences, are often a presence, a locus of sacred awakenings. My research journey has allowed me to create a heuristic concept of deep silence as the locus of the sacred. This concept reconfigures hospice chaplaincy, and reclaims the sacred in palliative care.
One of the principle theological themes that emerged from my narrative data, gathered from interviewing survivors of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, was that of divine providence. Although the terms ‘fatalism’ and ‘providence’ were never explicitly used by the researchers or the participants, the language interviewees used and the meaning they expressed would be categorised in traditional theological terms under divine providence. Yet, when social scientists commentate upon the same beliefs, they tend to use the term ‘religious fatalism’. What could appear to be a distinction without a difference, however, can actually represent a misunderstanding with possible egregious consequences. With reference to a discussion between a social geographer colleague and myself as a practical theologian, I seek to explore the dilemma that can arise over use of different terms when referring to the same incident by social scientists and theologians.
Despite constituting one of the most pressing ethical issues of our time, most white Christian ethicists and theologians fail to engage the issue of white supremacy in their work. As one of the most influential and prolific Christian ethicists of the past half‐century, Stanley Hauerwas represents this tendency, and provides specific reasons for his silence. This essay analyzes those reasons, and argues that a commitment to Alasdair MacIntyre’s understandings of tradition and narrative frames his view on race and prevents his engagement of racism. It then highlights the ways this reflects the broader trends of silence, abstraction, and colorblindness among white Christian ethicists when it comes to the issue. Identifying these failures, the essay concludes by suggesting that Hauerwas’s first published essay in 1969, on Black Power, provides resources for theologically engaging the problems of white supremacy today.
The trauma of sexual violence is pandemic. Such trauma contributes to numerous physical and psychological symptoms that affect individuals throughout their lifespan. Survivors are most inclined to turn to their faith and their religious community for support. Given the prevalence of sexual violence and the severity of its symptoms, it is critical that the Church serve as a sacred witness to facilitate the recovery process.
Trauma in relationship, often experienced as micro-trauma, may affect spirituality as spirituality is lived as and in a relationship to God. If a relationship is traumatizing it effects all dimensions of the human being and dispossesses him/her of his/her dignity. In trauma, identity is breaking and the offender denies the existence of his victim. Against this inner breakdown, the basic acceptance can provide healing forces. In pastoral care God’s promise “it is good that you exist” can be experienced concretely. In a traumatic relationship, individuality is destroyed. Against the malignant verdict of the offender, pastoral care can provide the experience of the “it is good how you are”. The loss of relationships by infidelity can heal in a faithful relationship, which provides the covenant that the first two promises will be true forever. This triple promise confirms a person’s dignity; it is a promise, which is finally and in an unbroken fidelity given by God himself.
This article, drawn from a comprehensive empirical study, offers a theological reflection on the transition from military to civilian life. The author revisits Tillich’s classical existential theology in an attempt to understand the transition as an existential threat to the participants in the study. The transition can be understood as a temporary state of non-being in life where identity, purpose, meaning, community, and belonging are at least initially lost, and this loss has implications for the spiritual and moral life of a service member amid transition. A call to friendship is proposed in order to assist a full transition to civilian life. The author suggests that theological interpretations of the process can contribute alternate voices and enrich the language repertoire and understandings of transition in secularised and pluralised contexts. Additionally, that it is beneficial to cultivate a more fruitful interdisciplinary relationship between the humanities (theology and the social sciences).
This article explores the powerful influence that trauma can have on individuals and the ways in which this influence might be addressed in the development of adult religious education. It asks how we can facilitate deepening a person's relationship with God and others when trauma has damaged a person's capacity to relate. Suggestions are made for future work by integrating trauma analysis from Judith Herman and Bessel van der Kolk with theological insight from Mary Elizabeth Moore and Rebecca Chopp. Five qualities of a trauma-informed approach to adult religious education are proposed.
In this chapter, Lisa Spriggens discusses the praxis of “witnessing” in her counselling work with survivors of sexual violence. She argues that sexual violence desecrates the sanctity of humanity, violating relationships with self, others, the cosmos, and God. Drawing on Rambo’s theology of witnessing, as well as theories of counselling, she explores the practice of witnessing as a form of meaning-making, and as a therapeutic act which promotes survivors’ healing; she also discusses the personal effects of this for the counsellor, as she experiences her “self” as a woman in a society which creates, and recreates, gendered violence. As she encounters this work, Spriggens finds herself asking, “What kind of person do I want to be in light of this work?” Considering the necessary call to social justice that follows witnessing, Spriggens invites readers to consider the small, and not so small, acts which take a stand against gendered violence. In attending to both the wellness of the survivor and larger societal change, she also explores how these different sites of working towards social justice might be supportive and generative in ways which counter some of the effects of witnessing to sexual violence.
In conversation with trauma specialist Bessel van der Kolk, this paper poses three questions for a theology of spiritual care. What does current thinking in trauma studies say about trauma and the human person? What does current thinking about trauma mean for the way we understand spirit and spirituality? What does this mean for the way spiritual care practitioners offer spiritual care to people living with trauma-related disorders? Taking seriously the advances in neuroscience that Van der Kolk applies to trauma studies, the paper proposes that spiritual care must understand spirit as a physiological reality and therefore welcome the whole human organism into the spiritual care space with kenotic humility. The conclusions of the paper are situated within the context of the theological conversation that follows the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher. It provides a critique of the recent definition of spirituality reported by Christina Puchalski, et al. [2014 Puchalski, C. et al. 2014. “Improving the Spiritual Dimension of Whole Person Care: Reaching National and International Consensus.” Journal of Palliative Medicine 17(6): 642–56. . “Improving the Spiritual Dimension of Whole Person Care: Reaching National and International Consensus.” Journal of Palliative Medicine 17(6): 642–56].
In chapters 1 and 2 of this book, I described the extent to which economic suffering was contributing to mental distress and how biomedical psychiatry alone did not account adequately for the kind of suffering that was so often social in nature. I described some psychiatric critics who challenged the biomedical framework, but in this chapter I argue that we must move beyond expert voices. This chapter explores some representative ways that people who have been involved with the mental health system interpret their distress.
Many of W. H. Auden’s poems written between 1939 and 1944 explored the Second World War, but only at a distance. After his experience in the Morale Division of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, however, his poems started to more fully examine the effects of the War. Auden’s grief over the War’s destruction would find voice in poems that are haunted by ghostly figures he encountered. Ruined places contain experience and memory. Auden’s postwar placed-based poems develop his theory of haunted places. There, Auden lived with the dead, and those figures showed him that both sin and love reside in the same space, thus offering hope for the future.
Wird ein Mensch geboren, so ist er in seiner leib-körperlichen Existenz in jeder Hinsicht verwundbar, empfänglich und darin responsiv auf die Fürsorge und den Schutz eines anderen angewiesen. Bereits die Geburt gilt daher als das erste Trauma, das ein Mensch durchlebt. Er wird vom nährenden Mutterleib getrennt und tritt in eine Existenz der körperlichen und seelischen Verletzlichkeit ein.
Our returning veterans face many challenges from loss of limb and physical disabilities to posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, substance abuse, homelessness, family problems, and unemployment. The greater challenge, though, for returning veterans is the injury to their soul due to the war and violence they have experienced. Our challenge is to create a place for grace to help them unlearn violence.
Ever since people's responses to overwhelming experiences have been systematically explored, researchers have noted that a trauma is stored in somatic memory and expressed as changes in the biological stress response. Intense emotions at the time of the trauma initiate the long-term conditional responses to reminders of the event, which are associated both with chronic alterations in the physiological stress response and with the amnesias and hypermnesias characteristic of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Continued physiological hyperarousal and altered stress hormone secretion affect the ongoing evaluation of sensory stimuli as well. Although memory is ordinarily an active and constructive process, in PTSD failure of declarative memory may lead to organization of the trauma on a somatosensory level (as visual images or physical sensations) that is relatively impervious to change. The inability of people with PTSD to integrate traumatic experiences and their tendency, instead, to continuously relieve the past are mirrored physiologically and hormonally in the misinterpretation of innocuous stimuli as potential threats. Animal research suggests that intense emotional memories are processed outside of the hippocampally mediated memory system and are difficult to extinguish. Cortical activity can inhibit the expression of these subcortically based emotional memories. The effectiveness of this inhibition depends, in part, on physiological arousal and neurohormonal activity. These formulations have implications for both the psychotherapy and the pharmacotherapy of PTSD.
Reports that death notices in the Times-Picayune, the New Orleans daily newspaper, increased dramatically in 2006 prompted local health officials to determine whether death notice surveillance could serve as a valid alternative means to confirm suspicions of excess mortality requiring immediate preventive actions and intervention.
Monthly totals of death notices from the Times-Picayune were used to obtain frequency and proportion of deaths from January to June 2006. To validate this methodology the authors compared 2002 to 2003 monthly death frequency and proportions between death notices and top 10 causes of death from state vital statistics.
A significant (47%) increase in proportion of deaths was seen compared with the known baseline population. From January to June 2006, there were on average 1317 deaths notices per month for a mortality rate of 91.37 deaths per 100,000 population, compared with a 2002-2004 average of 924 deaths per month for a mortality rate of 62.17 deaths per 100,000 population. Differences between 2002 and 2003 death notices and top 10 causes of death were insignificant and had high correlation.
Death notices from local daily newspaper sources may serve as an alternative source of mortality information. Problems with delayed reporting, timely analysis, and interoperability between state and local health departments may be solved by the implementation of electronic death registration.
On July 4, 1990, while on a morning walk in southern France, Susan Brison was attacked from behind, severely beaten, sexually assaulted, strangled to unconsciousness, and left for dead. She survived, but her world was destroyed. Her training as a philosopher could not help her make sense of things, and many of her fundamental assumptions about the nature of the self and the world it inhabits were shattered. At once a personal narrative of recovery and a philosophical exploration of trauma, this book examines the undoing and remaking of a self in the aftermath of violence. It explores, from an interdisciplinary perspective, memory and truth, identity and self, autonomy and community. It offers imaginative access to the experience of a rape survivor as well as a reflective critique of a society in which women routinely fear and suffer sexual violence. As Brison observes, trauma disrupts memory, severs past from present, and incapacitates the ability to envision a future. Yet the act of bearing witness, she argues, facilitates recovery by integrating the experience into the survivor's life's story. She also argues for the importance, as well as the hazards, of using first-person narratives in understanding not only trauma, but also larger philosophical questions about what we can know and how we should live. Bravely and beautifully written, Aftermath is that rare book that is an illustration of its own arguments.
How does severe interpersonal harm affect our freedom and the ways in which we relate to ourselves, others, and God? God and the Victim addresses the challenges that trauma and feminist theory pose to cherished theological convictions about human freedom and divine grace. Overall, the Christian tradition has held that a person's response to God's grace is not entirely vulnerable to earthly contingencies: interpersonal harm, however severe, cannot separate one from the grace of God and from the power to love others. Does this longstanding belief remain credible, however, in light of social scientific research on the insidious effects of interpersonal violence? Should we not consider more carefully the possibility that individuals can harm one another to such an extent that the other's capacity to respond to God's grace is severely diminished, if not altogether destroyed?
Drawing on insights present in feminist and trauma theory, this book articulates a revised Rahnerian theology of freedom and grace responsive to trauma survivors in need of healing. Such a revised theology of freedom and grace is marked most distinctively by two claims: (1) human freedom to respond to God's grace can possibly be destroyed by severe interpersonal harm, and (2) divine grace is mediated at least in part through loving interpersonal relations. This book argues that survivors' experiences of both interpersonal harm and support offer crucial insights that shed light on God's grace and human freedom. Ultimately, such insights promise profound ethical implications, altering our perceptions of the obligations we have toward one another.
While the post-9/11 wars have reshaped war as understood and practiced by the United States, theological discourse about war has changed very little. Highlighting distinctive dimensions of twenty-first-century war, I argue that existing theological discourse is insufficient to address these new realities. These “new wars” press up against existing theological frameworks for interpreting war and call for different modes of thought and action. This article proposes three angles for theological engagement—the traumatic, the interreligious, and the aesthetic. Taking the theological classroom as a starting point, I envision a new approach that prepares religious leaders for effective theological engagement about war.
This essay examines the human experience of reproductive loss and grief surrounding infertility, miscarriage and stillbirth, in particular why such painful silences persist where one might least expect it; namely, in feminist communities and in churches. By bringing into conversation feminist theory and systematic theology on this topic, the author effectively crosses (and cross-fertilizes) the boundaries of two important sets of discourse with the hope of better understanding why painful silences persist concerning reproductive loss and what theological – in particular Trinitarian – resources are available to help the church think about the issue (both those who suffer this loss and the broader community who seeks to understand it).