Online
General Audience
What is trauma? What is at stake in assigning labels such as “trauma” and “PTSD” to those who have experienced life-changing adverse events? What is the relationship between trauma and time? How might the church be a place of healing for trauma survivors? Join John Swinton and Warren Kinghorn for a conversation about what it means to consider trauma in theological perspective, and how the church is called to respond. Part of the Trauma-Informed Care Workshop Series.
Warren Kinghorn
Esther Colliflower Professor of the Practice of Pastoral and Moral Theology; Co-Director, Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative; Professor of Psychiatry, Duke University Medical Center
Dr. Kinghorn is a psychiatrist whose work centers on the role of religious communities in caring for persons with mental health problems and on ways in which Christians engage practices of modern health care. Jointly appointed within Duke Divinity School and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences of Duke University Medical Center, he is co-director of the Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative and is a staff psychiatrist at the Durham VA Medical Center. He has written on the moral and theological dimensions of combat trauma and moral injury, on the moral and political context of psychiatric diagnosis, and on the way that St. Thomas Aquinas’ image of the human as wayfarer might inform contemporary practices of ministry and mental health care.
John Swinton
Consulting Faculty, Duke Divinity School; Professor of Practical Theology and Pastoral Care & Chair in Divinity and Religious Studies, University of Aberdeen
John Swinton is a consulting faculty member at Duke Divinity and professor in practical theology and pastoral care and chair in divinity and religious studies at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. For more than a decade he worked as a registered mental health nurse. He also worked for a number of years as a hospital and community mental health chaplain alongside of people with severe mental health challenges who were moving from the hospital into the community. In 2004, he founded the University of Aberdeen’s Centre for Spirituality, Health and Disability. He has published widely within the area of mental health, dementia, disability theology, spirituality and healthcare, end-of-life care, qualitative research, and pastoral care. Swinton is the author of a number of monographs including his recent book, Finding Jesus in the Storm: The Spiritual Lives of People With Mental Health Challenges (Eerdmans 2020), which won the Aldersgate book prize for interdisciplinary theological research, and his book Dementia: Living in the Memories of God, which won the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Ramsey PrizeLink opens in new tab for excellence in theological writing. Swinton is a fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was recently elected as a fellow of the British Academy.