Trauma in a Lived Religion Perspective

Abstract

Walsh describes her core interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contributions in developing an embodied metaphorical correlational method for application in lived religion studies of trauma. She focuses particularly on poetics as a connection between the humanities, the sciences, and the social sciences, innovating the term material poetics and advocating for the replacement of the term “worldview” with a more richly embodied cultural “world/sense.” She also introduces lesser known theories from psychology for use in religious and spiritual studies: neuroaffective trauma studies, attachment and bereavement studies including continuing bonds, relational-cultural theory, narrative theory, internal family systems theory, and liberation health theory. She argues that these theories are more suited for embodied metaphorical correlation across academic disciplines and for cultural meaning-making and sociocultural power analysis in the aftermath of violent trauma.