Issue 25: Trauma

Why Bonhoeffer would have loved Mad Max.

The Other Journal discusses the paintings and processes of the Korean visual artist Mihyang Kim.

My husband and I were in a head-on vehicle collision north of Toronto on Highway 69 at a combined speed of about 125 miles per hour. We survived what was a fatal crash for the driver who hit us, but I was diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder, suffered a brain injury, experienced significant physical injuries, […]

A young girl tries to escape a grief-stricken home only to find that home is where her she is known most fully.

A woman wrestles with how post-traumatic stress disorder affects her daily life and faith.

Childhood trauma severely limits one’s imagination of the self and the world, causing victims to define themselves by their past experiences. Central to the healing process is a restructuring of one’s imagination of self and the world. In her book Trauma and Recovery, the psychiatrist Judith Herman describes hope as the final stage of recovery […]

In their collaborative search for “a new political imagination for today’s church,” Kingdom Politics authors Kristopher Norris and Sam Speers put into practice their own form of ecclesial witness.

On Wednesday, June 18, in Charleston, South Carolina, a tight-knit group of black men and women at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church welcomed a young white man to pray and read with them at their weekly Bible study. As they were wrapping up, the white man stood, announced his racist rationalizations, and shot at them. […]

If Benedict found inspiration in the desert, so can Rod Dreher.

I. Breast, n. either of the pair of mammary glands extending from the front of the chest in pubescent and adult human females and some other mammals the seat of emotion and thought[1]   When my breasts started to develop in early puberty, I thought I had cancer. On a family visit to my grandparents’ […]

In the end, the strangeness and opulence of her prose leaves the impression that Sonderegger is drunk with delight at the thought of God’s nature. And who can fault her for that?

The Other Journal interviews internationally recognized artist Ken Gonzales-Day about his recent project Run Up, his perspective on historically constructed systems of race and representation, and his posture of bearing witness to traumatic cultural realities through his work.

The artist cannot pass lightly over the disorder of the creation without being guilty of colossal self-deception and becoming utterly irrelevant to the needs of a broken and torn world. —Jeremy Begbie, Voicing Creation’s Praise A number of years ago, I attended a recital by the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter. She began with Anton Webern’s Four […]

The unlikely route to joy involves entering the stories of suffering that have marked our lives.

The poet Donald Paris writes about his father.

Stephen Long’s Saving Karl Barth demonstrates how theological friendship might begin to heal a five-hundred-year division in the church.

With the help of Søren Kierkegaard, Dean Dettloff explores how traumatic experience alienates us from ourselves, our world, and our faith—and yet gets resolved through the wondrous renewal of life itself.

Two women whose strategies for living a meaningful life conflict vie for ownership of an antique family barn.

The roaring seas of the apocalypse are displacing millions of global refugees.

She rode out to sea at the wheel of the rented boat, her hair wild in the wind.

The story of Rahab begins early in the Joshua narrative. As the Israelites prepare to cross the Jordan River, they launch their conquest on Canaan by sending spies west. Two spies stay with Rahab in Jericho and she protects them from capture by hiding them on her roof and deceiving the Jericho authorities. Rahab later […]

Marilynne Robinson’s novels have become almost synonymous with loneliness, but solitude here remains entangled with a less acknowledged trope—an enveloping and dazzling darkness.

Pain and trauma can lead us beyond the limits of our conceptual frameworks to new ways of connecting with God and others.

In the beginning, God gave birth, and it was really hard.

Christian theologies of suffering often move too quickly to redemption, but in this interview with Shelly Rambo, she advocates a theology that remains in the ambiguous middle space between life and death, bearing witness to how trauma lingers in human experience.

How this year’s Oscar-winning best picture can teach us about our selfhood and search for meaning.

A poem about the life/death/life cycle of the seasons and those we love.

Is God’s love of any material benefit to trauma survivors, particularly to survivors of sexualized violence?

A story of a student waking up to the genocidal conquest that founded her country and the contemporary reenactments of this violence.

A character study examining the human desire for permanence and importance apart from normative life in Birdman.

Theology is one of the ways in which we repress anxiety, and though repression often produces fictitious ideas that do not work, the anxiety it covers does not lie.

As technological advance sells users on increasing personal power and protection from trauma, Christians must consider the idolatrous potential of buying in.

Brigid Andrews writes about the trauma of birthing and postpartum depression.

The aftermath of bodily trauma can yield unexpected revelations about oneself and others.

The poet Libby Swope Wiersema writes on grief and healing.

Boyhood’s twelve-year-long view of time serves to reorient our perspective about what is important and meaningful in a lifetime.

In the wake of domestic violence, new kinship structures are crucial to providing safe spaces of healing and to developing communal practices of resistance.

Several pieces displayed in an art museum exhume the challenging past that led one young poet to a renewed sense of faith.

The trauma of God is both God in trauma (i.e., God on the cross) and God as trauma (i.e., God as the cross), crossing one another to place God sous rature (i.e., under the cross), where God becomes no more and no less than a word—but the only word bespeaking a truly universal human community.