You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week, Dan is joined by Dr. Shaliyh Stearns, a violinist, theologian, and associate professor of theology at the Seattle School.

Dan has moved to tears, and he might not be the only one, as Chalie shares about her work in developing a theology of abuse and about her

deep conviction that we find God most often in places of immense sorrow and stunning beauty.

I have the distinct and also delightful pleasure to be with one of my dearest colleagues and friends,

Shilly Stearns. Hi, Shalie. Hi, Dan. Shaliyie, we get to teach a number of things together. And I think

people have perhaps met you, but maybe not for a while. We haven't done a

podcast for a while. So would it be well with your heart if you just give folks a little bit

of a sense of you're a very odd and quirky being?

I don't know.

Yeah, I teach here at the Seattle School, and I teach theology.

I'm like, how much do you want to know?

I want to know as much as you want to say.

Yeah, I teach theology here at the Seattle School, and a lot of the work that I do is around theology and the arts, but more recently have gotten into how to talk about lament, which has brought me into talking about trauma.

But that's not the quirky part of me.

You know, the quirky parts of me probably get into why it is I love artists and I love in some ways the wrong question to be asked

because sometimes that gets us much further than just always asking the same question over and over again,

thinking that we're going to get a different answer. Well, you love asking the wrong question in the right place in a way in which things

come that you might not have expected. We get to teach a class called faith, hope, and love,

even though you are abandoning me. Oh, I'm so very sorry.

You are taking a well-deserved. It's not a rest, but it's a well-deserved sabbatical. And what you'll

be doing at least a portion of is writing on a theology of abuse.

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