The call for trauma-informed education is growing as the profound impact trauma has for the children’s ability to learn in traditional classrooms is recognized. For children who have experienced abuse and neglect their behavior is often highly reactive, aggressive, withdrawn or unmotivated. They struggle to learn, to make positive relationships or be influenced positively by teachers and school staff. Students become more and more at risk for mental health difficulties. Teachers become more and more frustrated and discouraged as they attempt to teach this vulnerable group of students. Even though it is relationships that have hurt students with developmental trauma, it is known that they must find safe relationships to learn and heal. Forming those relationships with children who have been hurt and no longer trust adults is not easy. This book focuses on three important and comprehensive areas of theory and research that provide a theoretical, clinical, and integrated intervention model for developing the relationships and felt sense of safety children with developmental trauma need. Using what is known from attachment theory, intersubjectivity theory, and interpersonal neurobiology, the reader is helped to understand why children behave in the challenging ways they do. This book offers successes and ongoing challenges as a means to continue the conversation about how best to support some of our most at-risk youth.
A Church for the World: The Church’s Role in Fostering Democracy and Sustainable Development challenges theologians and lay readers alike to think about the role of the church vis-à-vis its responsibility to the world. How may the church contribute to democracy and foster sustainable development? Contributors from mostly non-Western theological communities offer historical, developmental, ecclesiastical, and theological perspectives on the church-world relationship, challenging misconceptions and practices that prevent the church from living up to its transformational vocation as salt and light in the world (Matt. 5:13-16). The driving force behind the questions and perspectives discussed here is Gustavo Gutierrez’s axiom in A Theology of Liberation : A theology which fails to address the most urgent needs of ordinary people is not worthy of the word “theology.” Proceeding from this insight, this book creates awareness about the relationship between religion, democracy, and development, and aims to strengthen the self-understanding of the church with regard to its responsibilities in the world.
Quoting Derrida, in The Animal at Unease with Itself: Death Anxiety and the Animal-Human Boundary in Genesis 2–3 Isaac M. Alderman draws attention to the fact that humans are the only animals who are disturbed by nakedness. This unease with regard to our own bodies is an important aspect of the study of disgust and death anxiety. Alderman seeks to apply terror management theorists’ focus on death anxiety to biblical studies and to utilize the concept of animal reminder disgust‒‒the visceral reaction to reminders of our animality‒‒to better understand the opening chapters of Genesis, dealing particularly with themes of mortality, the human body, and the animal-human boundary in those chapters. After describing relevant aspects of cognitive science, terror management theory, and animal reminder disgust, Alderman demonstrates, using Genesis 2‒3 (and the role of clothing as a marker of the animal-human boundary there) as a case study, that an interdisciplinary approach that draws on cognitive science can illumine the biblical text in important ways.
This book is an in-depth reflection and analysis on why and how unsettling empathy is a crucial component in reconciliatory processes. Located at the intersection of memory studies, reconciliation studies, and trauma studies, the book is at its core transdisciplinary, presenting a fresh perspective on how to conceive of concepts and practices when working with groups in conflict. The book Unsettling Empathy has come into being during a period of increasing cultural pessimism, where we witness the spread of populism and the rise of illiberal democracies that hark back to nationalist and ethnocentric narratives of the past. Because of this changed landscape, this book makes an important contribution to seeking fresh pathways toward an ethical practice of living together in light of past agonies and current conflicts. Within the specific context of working with groups in conflict, this book urges for an (ethical) posture of unsettling empathy. Empathy, which plays a vital role in these processes, is a complex and complicated phenomenon that is not without its critics who occasionally alert us to its dark side. The term empathy needs a qualifier to distinguish it from related phenomena such as pity, compassion, sympathy, benign paternalism, idealized identification, or voyeuristic appropriation. The word “unsettling” is just this crucial ingredient without which I would hesitate to bring empathy into our conversation.