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

Shalise Stearns, Associate Professor of Theology at the Seattle School, continues talking with

Dan about her work toward developing a theology of trauma and abuse. What does it mean to address trauma

in view of the embodied life of Christ? And how might this change the way that we as believers tend to the stories of harm in our communities?

Shilie, I want people to think with us, but I'm really thinking for myself.

You have a project, you have a sense of calling to help the believing community articulate a theology of trauma and abuse.

And I kind of want you to go back to where we were last time and go, what does that look like?

What's prompted you to take this on?

You're a young woman, so I won't say your life project, but I'll say, it's going to be a life project in many ways for a long time? So does that? Yeah, I think

one of the things that I was surprised by the other day, I was going back and looking at my PhD

dissertation, and I had done my work on Arnold Chernberg. And there have been a couple of moments

when this has come up

of that realization that, oh, I've been asking this question for a really long time. And, you know,

I thought I was really intrigued by, so my dissertations on the question of unity. How do we talk

about unity in musical space? How do we talk about unity in Trinitarian space?

And in some ways that sounds really, really abstract.

But as I've gone back and heard different people talk and maybe,

and a few people who have written on Chernberg, I realized,

well, no, this is really about how does a person claim, for one thing, that they're a full and whole person, which Schernberg really contended with most of his life because he had a Jewish body in a world that that was not allowed.

You know, and so he born and raised in Vienna.

You know, so there's, so he's and raised in Vienna.

You know, so there's, so he's just longing his entire life to articulate this kind of Germanic music and to be recognized as a premier German composer.

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