Empowered by Trauma: Redefining Gospel Teachings

After twenty years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, a global pandemic, protests against racial violence, and frequent shootings, more Americans than ever are living with the effects of trauma.

Our conversation with Army veteran and Episcopal priest David Peters helps us see the good news that Jesus was born and died in a traumatized world, and his story speaks forever to wounded people worldwide.

Peters' book Post-Traumatic Jesus: Reading the Gospel with the Wounded explores Jesus' life story through the post-traumatic lens with which the Gospel writers first wrote it--as people who had seen their leader executed by the same oppressive government that had already shrouded their whole lives in anxiety and fear. Meeting the post-traumatic Jesus--the only Jesus the world has ever known--can be a balm to the wounds of modern Christians and spiritual seekers.

David W. Peters served as an enlisted Marine and Army Chaplain, who deployed to Iraq in 2005. He is the author of several books, notably Death Letter: God, Sex and War and Post-Traumatic God: How the Church Cares for People Who Have Been to Hell and Back, and Post-Traumatic Jesus: Reading the Gospel with the Wounded. Today he serves as the vicar of St. Joan of Arc Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas.

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