The Heart Keeps the Score: Judith Herman and the Moral Context of Trauma Theology

While trauma studies are gaining popularity, increased public awareness trades on reductive summaries that elide the moral context of trauma in favor of stress-based models acceptable to modern medicine. This creates unique challenges for integrating trauma studies into morally saturated disciplines like theology, especially when those disciplines foreground existential insights from trauma as with the emerging sub-discipline of “trauma theology.” In this paper, I draw from moral injury research to resource what I call “morally expansive” approaches to trauma theology. Using Bessel van der Kolk’s work as a foil, I suggest that Judith Herman’s recent addition of a fourth stage to her famous threefold stages of trauma recovery signals the need for recovering moral contexts in interdisciplinary trauma research. In van der Kolk’s terms, I conclude that while the body may be the “scoreboard” of trauma, it is the moral center (the heart”) of a person that keeps that score.