How does movement across borders affect the self-understanding of a Korean immigrant church in the United States? How does the trauma experienced by Vietnamese refugees lead to the need for an embodied epistemology? And how might the trauma of Christ's passion be represented in differently situated gospel narratives written in contexts of political contestation - conquest and exile from an emperor's court? Exploring the complicated textures of trauma, its consequences, and its movement into new political conditions, these three papers offer case studies in trauma and representation across borders.
The “frame” of the American War in Vietnam has rendered Vietnamese refugees, particularly women, legible only insofar as they are willing to offer their forgiveness of American male violence. Christian theology, in prioritizing the forgiveness of American war crimes over the need to witness Vietnamese refugee’s pain, has colluded with the dehumanizing structures that deny Vietnamese refugee women’s subjectivity. Yet the solution is not to offer a complete narrative of Vietnamese refugee trauma; both critical refugee studies and the material turn in trauma theory question whether narrative is sufficient to bear witness to war wounds. Building from critical refugee studies combined with Shelly Rambo’s work on trauma and theology, I argue for a Christian theological account that witnesses to trauma by utilizing a sensory epistemology to construct a more textured perspective on forgiveness
Due to their ties to their home countries, immigrant churches reflect foreign political, ideological, and cultural influences. These influences impact both the church and the immigrant community. Korean immigrant churches, shaped by Korea's political context, often maintain mono-faith and mono-ethnic structures, fostering exclusionary attitudes. In the diverse landscape of the United States, this exclusivity may provoke isolation or even violence. Therefore, examining the intersection of political-religious identity and immigration in these churches is crucial. In this paper, I argue that Korean immigrant church should transition its foundational structure from an exclusive structure of separation/survival to the structure of embrace/self-emptiness. It explores the origins of the separation/survival structure through the political context of Korea and proposes a theological framework based on Christ's ministry for embrace/self-emptiness.
This paper posits that constructive theologies of interpersonal trauma are often cyphered through religious texts and reflections. This is illustrated via a comparison of the betrayal of Christ in two unique and highly contextualized gospels. The first, the Old Saxon Heliand, depicts Jesus as a conquered chieftain, submissive to his fated agony, potentially intending to domesticate the rebellious ethos of the recently conquered Saxons. The second example emerges from a criminally understudied text, the Homerocentones of the Empress Eudocia. She presents a defiant Christ, who levels a poetic condemnation of Judas and other evildoers and thus reflects facets of Eudocia’s own character and possibly aids in her own internal adjudication of her unjust banishment from the imperial court. Such trauma informed reading produces fresh understandings of how collective and individual traumatization can be navigated within the resources of a scriptural tradition and its varied contextualizations.