Trend topics sexual assault and the church: a review of speaking rape, victims lost, surviving God, the hero and whore

Speaking of rape: the limits of language in sexual violations

By Danielle Tumminio Hansen
fortress

Danielle Tumminio Hansen is based on feminist theory, psychology, practical theology and your personal experience to examine how the words we use for sexual violations affect our perception of victims, survivors and perpetrators. She problematized so many of these words that I am tried to hang several brackets here. For example: “If we reduce a person to a perpetrator, she writes,” we are trying to combine character and action with each other. If these two things are not the same. “The language of” victim “and” perpetrator “, argues Hansen, encourages us to believe only perfect victims and only suspect that the prevailing stereotypical of perpetrators fit. She prefers the terms “attackers” and “perpetrator” or even “person who harm” who create a distance between the person and the problem.

In her analysis, Hansen ensures very careful in order to show the “linguistic and epistemic damage” that results when our language expresses the entire spectrum of sexual injury, and instead immortalize cultural rape scripts that immortalize misery, racism, homophobia, transthobia and classicism. It suggests that restorative justice could be a way to counteract linguistic injustice and to offer a voice to those who have suffered sexual violations.

Lost victim: the dark heritage of the cross

By Ashley Theuring
Orbis

The practical theologian Ashley Theuring examines how reconciliation theories both immortalized the abuse crisis in the church and helped the survivors to understand their suffering. It begins with a survey of three classic atonement theories –Christ VictorSubstitutional atonement and moral influence – and then describes their contemporary criticisms from feminist liberation and non -violent theologians, who always pay attention to how these stories can act as agents of healing than damage. It then offers a short history of the abuse crisis in the Catholic Church and contrasts the catastrophic institutional reaction with best practice for the management of abuse. Like Hansen, she recognizes the promise of restorative judicial practices for combating and relieving common and individual suffering. Finally, the stories of the Gospels give the tribunal stories back in order to uncover a modern understanding of crucifixion and resurrection and to interweave these topics in stories that are shared by survivors in order to place them into the theological heart of the Church.

Theuring looks like a future that is really overwhelmed, one in which the presence of survivors in a church community can be a source of hope and healing instead of moral injuries. It does not have to be the case, she says that stories of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus “increase the self -sacrifice of the powerless”. You can be “powerful and radical examples of the reality of evil, criticisms of self -sacrificing, God's suffering solidarity and the common role in suffering and healing”.

Surve God: a new vision of God through the eyes of sexual abuse survivors

By Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan M. Shaw
Broadleaf books

Survive God Also centered the voices of the abuse survivor, while potentially harmful Christian beliefs rethink. While Theuring focuses on the monetary theology and sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, Grace Ji-Sun Kim and Susan Shaw demonstrate how traditional thinking about God maintains abuse in a variety of Christian contexts and prevent survivors and their communities from healing. Both authors are survivors of sexual abuse in childhood and also consider themselves as surviving God – or at least the god of their children's churches, the “God of bad ideas, marginalize and suppress”.

But the title of the book also refers to the God who survives when we reject the harmful beliefs, tropics and language, justify and apologize abuse. The “surviving God” is the God who suffers with us. Kim and Shaw tell their own stories and build in the voices of other survivors, and they also visit the stories of those who survive (and do not survive) sexual violence in the Bible, where they “find God as the one who comes with people who sacrificed sexual violence and demands justice for them”.

The hero and the whore: healing and liberation from sexual exploitation in the Bible back

By Camille Hernandez
Westminster John Knox

Where Kim and Shaw use a gentle approach for problematic fonts, Camille Hernandez throws a dynamite tab. Have you ever heard that Sarai was described as the “Bottom Bitch” of a pimp? Me neither. But Hernandez argues convincingly that Sarai's closeness encourages her to grasp the same system that suppresses it to suppress Hagar. The connections Hernandez between the modern sex trade and the history of Abram, Sarai and Hagar arouse these characters to life in a way that I have never experienced before. Hernandez repeatedly works with this obliterative magic and blends the most disturbing biblical stories about women and sex into pieces and prepares me to throw the whole Dang story into the trash – before it begins to take up and show the pieces where God lives in the shards.

How do we understand God's command as soon as God recognizes Hagar to return to your perpetrator (Gen. 16: 9–10)? “Too often we hear this verse that tells us that we should return to the location of the damage, violence and enslavement,” says Hernandez and as a former evangelical she once accepted this reading. The warmistic theology gave her the space to question itself and go away. Only she doesn't. It has come to mind through her own experiences with abuse and recovery and the hard truth recognizes that for many survivors there are “certain situations in which the return is inevitable”. Sometimes a foster child is sent back to an unhealthy family system. Sometimes we have to work with an unhealthy ex-partner. “Return does not mean that they succumb to the environment and become victims again,” Hernandez writes. “Healing is part of the return.” She notes that God confirms Hagar's value and promises her a future before God sends Hagar back to Abram and Sarai. In Hernandez 'reading, God entrusted Hagar return.

Her readings by Leah and Dinah, Potiphar's wife, Gomer and other stories about sexual exploitation are also unshakable, devastating and even angry. They are also creative, fully imaginary and ultimately hopeful. I closed this book full of right-wing anger and a deep admiration for how Hernandez runs directly in texts with terrorist and real horror stories. “The good news is that the women of the Bible cannot change their approach,” Hernandez writes, “if they know their stories, helps us to change ours.”