About this eBook
In Reframing Trauma, Holton and Snodgrass compile essays that expand our understanding of trauma as a stress-trauma continuum. The volume engages the challenges of racism, eco-violence, and myriad sociopolitical and interpersonal injustices that injure individuals, communities, and the globe. Each essay is grounded in a strength-based approach to trauma and contextualizes our societal negativity bias within spiritual values of hope, growth, and resilience. Meanwhile, the understanding of a trauma-stress continuum avoids diminishing the suffering that emerges from stress and trauma of all kinds.
Holton and Snodgrass also offer a reframed theology of trauma. The volume mines Christian theology and wisdom from other faith traditions for insight into interpersonal and communal woundedness that, paradoxically, both expands and narrows our understandings of trauma. This exploration helps identify implications for spiritually integrated care and counseling, chaplaincy, and pastoral education.
The result is a groundbreaking understanding of stress and trauma as an ever-evolving concept that is imbued with theological and spiritual wisdom. Such wisdom eschews the limitations of Western understandings of trauma. This wisdom offers insight into how stressful and traumatic experiences can be both life-limiting and life-giving, both despair-inducing and the impetus for growth and resilience.
Reframing Trauma will engage educators in pastoral and practical theology, spirituality, and psychology; care practitioners in congregational and healthcare settings; and clinical mental health professionals who offer spiritually integrated care. Likewise, trained Christian laity will find the book an invaluable resource for cultivating an inclusive and meaningful understanding of trauma in their congregational caregiving.
About the author
M. Jan Holton is associate professor of the Practice of Pastoral Theology and Care at Duke University Divinity School. Her work focuses on the psychodynamic implications of trauma and forced displacement, the intercultural dynamics within pastoral care, and pastoral care to marginalized populations. She is the author of two books, Longing for Home and Building the Resilient Community, as well as various articles.
Rev. Jill L. Snodgrass is professor of theology at Loyola University Maryland. She is a pastoral-practical theologian, scholar-activist, and ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Her research focuses on spiritual care and counseling with traditionally marginalized populations. She recently coauthored Moral Injury After Abortion: Exploring the Psychospiritual Impact on Catholic Women (Routledge, 2023), and her book Liminality is expected to be published by Fortress Press in 2025.
