Rumi on Trauma

I don’t think it takes much work for us to connect the dots between this poem of Rumi’s and the themes of our class…He captures so well the experience of speechlessness that accompanies trauma, as well as touching from his mystical tradition of Islam the image of remaining in the middle way of Holy…

Eco-Eschatology

Eschatology has to do with “end times.” And in many popular American versions of it, it has had to do with the great destruction of all things. The great apocalyptic passages in Revelation in which stars are falling from the heavens and fire is raining down seems to paint a pretty bleak picture for…

“God rid me of god…” — Meister Eckhart

Doing the work of theology in partnership with trauma, is an ever more incomplete and messy conversation. As I sat through the panel discussions in our last week of class, I again heard that while we were arriving at perhaps deeper and better questions, while we…

This week our group’s conversation danced between trauma, grief, lament, and processing the lecture from Dr. Newby. As squishy and evasive as a conversation around these themes can be, as much as trauma can resist the forming of words and categories, so too went our conversation this week. As much of a collage of seeming disparate movements and…

A Discussion on Kathryn Tanner’s Contribution to Eco-Theology

This week’s chapter was a discussion of Kathryn Tanner’s contribution to eco-theology, which ended up raising many more questions than we could possibly begin to answer. The overall theme was that God in not in competition…

Eco-Theological Trauma

The recent, collective experience of trauma as presented in texts like The Body Keeps the Score and Trauma and Memory is that it infects the human body in a way that is utterly chaotic and isolating. As we begin to contemplate trauma as it relates to theology, more specifically…

Post 1: Living as If

The prompt that medium has here says, “tell your story.” How often do we hear that in our day to day? If you attend the Seattle School, some question of your story is begged at least once. The interesting thing, at least for me, is that in this discussion around Evangelical Ecotheology…

To simply breathe.

To be a witness can invoke a wide variety of emotions and reactions. When one witnesses a magical sunset or the new growth of spring’s blossoms, awe and curiosity take us back to the purity of childhood. To stand beside something so grand, yet simple, is to physically and emotionally feel both…

I’ll be Your Middle Spirit

I took this picture almost three years ago in the Swiss Alps near Lausanne. This was a very in between time for me, I was…