Introduction

Abstract

Walsh situates her case studies in the US context of historical colonialism and increasing violent encounters, including mass shootings and the growing Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in response to police brutality. She argues for expansion of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary lived religion studies of responses to violent trauma, with particular attention to ministerial responses that integrate trauma knowledge from the social sciences. Two case studies drawn from different socioeconomic and cultural locations are introduced—one a grassroots urban lay-led ministry that supports family homicide survivors in Boston and the other a denominational trauma response to a shooting in a Unitarian Universalist congregation in Knoxville, TN. Issues of power, culture, and visceral dimensions to border crossing of academic disciplinary language begin to be introduced.