41: Trauma-Informed Spiritual Care with Danielle Tumminio Hansen

Monday, November 25, 2024

The Rev’d Dr. Danielle Tumminio Hansen, an alum and professor, joins Hannah and Brandon for an enriching discussion about teaching theology using pop culture (Harry Potter), trauma-informed spiritual care, and new frontiers in the theology of abortion. 

Hosts: Brandon Nappi and Hannah Black

Guest: Danielle Tumminio Hansen

Production: Goodchild Media

Music: Wayfaring Stranger, Theodicy Jazz Collective

Art: Ella Landino

Brandon:                Hi, Hannah. 

Hannah:                 Hey, Brandon. How’s it going? What’s happening in your world today? 

B:            Oh my gosh. Well, I am in my new office here, in the garden level of the Berkeley Center. So if you’re hearing, like, a different auditory environment, there’s probably still some … some adjustment to make to the acoustic dimensions of the space, but I’m here. I’ve got my Yale pennant in the background, and I have my Cinque Terre poster up. So I feel like …

H:           It almost feels as if I am in Italy just looking at the screen right now.

B:            Do you smell the citrus trees blowing into the wind? 

H:           Very nearly.

B:            Anyway, that’s kinda what’s going on in my world. How about you?

H:           Well, I am smelling the sweet aromas of pies baking because I’m … I’m in full Thanksgiving mode, Brandon. I started off telling myself I’m gonna bake two pies. Now I have plans for four. One and a half pies are already in the freezer. A lot of math is happening. And then to top it all off, the thing I think people are actually most excited for is … over the summer, Target (so weird) had a sale on dog costumes that are turkeys. So Nelly will be dressing up as a turkey for Thanksgiving. The anticipation is killing me. Like, I’m a person who loves to look forward to a fun thing, and so I’m now just in full Thanksgiving mode. 

B:            I love it. And I’m reminded that on the Enneagram, you are the are you the achiever? 

H:           I sure am, Brandon. 

B:            And so, like, Hannah, Dr. Hannah Black doesn’t just bake pies. 

H:           No. There are so many pies. We haven’t gotten to the point of spreadsheets, but that’s the vibe. 

B:            Let’s be honest. It won’t be long. 

H:           Yep. Yep.

B:            Well, I can almost smell the the the pumpkin spice wafting over here and, 

H:           It’s exciting. 

B:            Well, we’ll have to share, on the Instagram account, the pictures of Nelly when she’s full gobble gobble. 

H:           For sure. It’s it’s honestly so ridiculous. I like to think I wouldn’t have bought it if it wasn’t on sale, but if I do some inner searching, the answer becomes clear and shameful. But the the dog costume has Velcro drumsticks on it that are dog squeaky toys. Like, the whole thing … there’s no dignity involved. 

B:            Well and I love the the irony that she will be without any knowledge of it, dressing up as ultimately what will be dinner. 

H:           Yeah. Yeah. There’s no getting around that one. 

B:            No. It is sorta dark and and, undoubtedly humorous. And Nellie has been here at the Berkeley Center as the new as the new Berkeley Divinity School at Yale mascot Totally. For sure. Welcoming students. Yep. Making theological pronouncements.

H:           They’ll crown her Professor Nellie any day now. 

B:            Well, at least she’ll be a lowly lecturer like the …

We can only hope. Oh, boy.

H:           Okay. Well Well turning to slightly more serious things, might I introduce us to our guest for the day? I’m really excited about this one because the Reverend Dr. Danielle Tumminio Hansen is a friend of a few friends, and she’s also somebody who was a Berkeley student. So … is part of our community, is returning to our community. So let me just kind of give you a brief introduction so we know why we’re excited to hear from her.

               The Rev. Dr. Danielle Tumminio Hansen centers her work at the intersection of practical theology, trauma studies, and feminist philosophy. So she’s a hardcore theologian who’s out here doing really important work. She’s the author of five books, the most recent of which are Trauma Informed Spiritual Care: Interventions for Safety, Meaning, Reconnection, and Justice, which we’ll talk a lot about today and I’ll definitely link to in the show notes. And Speaking of Rape: the Limit of Language and Sexual Violations. Her research interests include the theological dimensions of trauma, theological issues related to sex and reproduction, narrative theories of the self, epistemic injustice, restorative justice, and social epistemology. She has appeared as a guest on major national and international news outlets to discuss the intersection of religion and pop culture. And she’s a Yalie. She has a BA from Yale in English. She has an MDiv and an STM from Yale Divinity School. And her PhD in Practical Theology is from Boston University. She’s currently Associate Professor of Practical Theology and Spiritual care at Candler School of Theology at Emory. So excited. 

B:            Wow. Wow. I mean, she really is the pracademic, isn’t she?

H:           Totally. 

B:            I mean, just bridging … the divide that we sometimes feel?

H:           Honestly, we love a priest theologian. Yeah. Mhmm.

B:            Yeah. Yeah. It is a … it is a weakness of ours? Like, bring them on. Like, is it a weakness? It’s not a weakness. We just get really excited about… 

H:           I think it’s a secret strength of ours. There are a bunch of priest theologians around. We just maybe don’t expect that the way contemporary academia and church and world are set up. 

B: Yeah. Yeah. Enjoy this one.

B:            Hi. I’m Brandon Nappy. 

H:           Hi. I’m Hannah Black, and we’re your hosts on the Leaders Way podcast. 

B:            A Yale podcast empowering leaders, cultivating spirituality, and exploring theology.

H:           This podcast is brought to you by Berkeley Divinity School, The Episcopal Seminary at Yale. 

H:           Well, welcome to the podcast. I’m really excited you could join us. You’re not only an esteemed theologian, but you’re also a Berkeley grad. So you’re a part of our community coming back to the community in a different way. It’s very exciting. 

Rev. Danielle Hansen:          Thank you. You know, I’m not only just a Berkeley grad, but I’m a Yale undergrad too who spent a lot of time at Berkeley as an undergrad. So I feel like I’ve actually earned, like, multiple Berkeley certificates even though I just have the one. The one official one.

H:           You’re a super Yalie and a super Berkeleyite? 

D:           There you go. Yeah. 

B:            This is where I say, boola boola. And we don’t really know what the word means. And in fact, when I was suffering about insomnia last week, I decided to Google “boola boola,” and I learned it’s a nonsense word completely made up simply to rhyme with “hula.” So I wanna disabuse anyone of the notion that this is a very fancy word that only Yalies can use or understand. 

H:           This is such, like, a very disappointing etymological rabbit trail.

B:            There’s no there there. 

D:           The issue is really keeping me up at night, so I’m so glad. 

H:           We’re here to uncover the hard hitting truths of our time. 

B:            Doing my little part. 

H:           Well, okay. Speaking of Yale and your work at Yale, you also taught at Yale and wrote a book about teaching Harry Potter at Yale. Brandon and I love to go on little Harry Potter rabbit trails when we can, not only because it’s contested and therefore fun to talk about, but we both love Harry Potter. So 

B:            This is the book we both wish we wrote. We’re so envious. 

H:           The teaching Harry Potter at Yale book. Yeah. Definitely. What did you learn teaching about Harry Potter at Yale? Did anything surprise you? What was the climate like?

D:           Oh, that’s such a great question. So I actually taught that class during my STM that I taught that class. So I did an MDiv at Yale, and then I did an STM after. So, during the time I was doing my STM, in August of that year, the summer of that year, the last Harry Potter book came out. And I had been following all of the conversation in the news media about whether the books were heretical and whether Christians should read them. And that was such a big source of controversy of, are these books heretical? Because there are witches and wizards in it and, you know, these kids are not good role models because they’re witches and wizards. And, you know, a lot of these conversations were just happening in these very short editorials and it was really frustrating to me because I felt like, you know, I had been doing all this work in theology and I was so excited about it. And the one thing or one of the many things I learned at Yale was that theology is really rich and it’s really nuanced. And so if you wanna have a conversation about theology in the series, that is a great conversation, but you’re not gonna sort it out in 5-to-800 words.

               So I proposed a college seminar, to do this, and, I think the first thing that I learned was, the … the backlash that that initially got even before the seminar was approved. There was a Yale Daily News article saying, you know, oh, there was a, like, joke of a seminar proposed for the college seminars. And, you know, and of course– not looking at the reading list that had, you know, 400 pages of reading a week of, you know, Serene Jones and Paul Lakeland and Dan Maglire, like, these big names in theological education, that this was far from light reading. And, you know, it’s all this judginess, and then, you know, the seminar got sponsored by 2 colleges. There was a … at that point, you had to physically show up to register for a class. So there was, you know, a physical weight of students that went around the corner from the college where it was being offered. I sorted through close to a hundred applications. And, you know, the students that were in that class were so diverse. They were racially diverse. They were, religiously diverse.

They came from a whole bunch of spiritual backgrounds. There was a Southern Baptist. There was a Mormon. There was a Hindu student. There were, students who were atheists, you know, liberal protestants, and … so there are eighteen of them all around the table together.

               And I think I remember thinking on the first day of class, like, this is this is such a test about how we can all get along and how we can all communicate, and, you know, I’m gonna get to find out whether this can work or not. And those students did a tremendous job of engaging very authentically, bringing their whole selves to the classroom, having really honest conversations about things that matter. We talked about what happens after death. We talked about what happens…  you know, what the meaning of evil is, what grace looks like. And I think there were a few things that made that successful, and, you know, one of them was that we weren’t actually going straight for the topic. We were using the books and kind of going around into the topic. And I think, you know, as opposed to saying, why does this evil thing in our world happen? Now we’re saying, why does this evil thing in a fictional world happen, and what does it mean? So it takes away a layer of personal engagement and lets you speak about these really tender things, you know, without quite as much personally at stake. So I think that was one reason.

               The second, which is really simple, is that I brought snacks to class every week, and I think snacks really help. Like, my son is six, and he says, “I am so much nicer with snacks.”

H:           So am I. 

D:           Like, he said it one day, like, this big revelation. Mom, I think I’m nicer with snacks.

               So I think that helped a lot. But then, you know, I think the last thing was that they wanted to be there. Right? They were one of those hundred students that were lined up, so they wanted to have the conversations. And, you know, what I said to them on the first day of class, and then I said to the students I taught in subsequent years, because I taught that class for several years after that. Because, of course, after I did the first time, then it was like, “We’re so proud at Yale that we had this class.” Oh my gosh. That’s so funny. So … but I said, you know, I would say to the students, I I’m pretty sure theology is not what brought you here. I’m pretty sure Harry Potter is what brought you here, but I actually really hope that theology is what keeps you here. Because these topics that we’re discussing, I call them 2 AM questions. They’re the ones that keep you up at 2 o’clock in the morning, and you need a vocabulary to think critically about these questions. And that goes across the board. You know, whether you’re a Christian or not, whether you agree with this or not, these questions are so important, and you deserve frameworks to ask them.

               So, yeah. So I learned that there are … there really are ways to engage difference, and there are ways to create community, and that we can just learn a lot together around a table. 

B:            How did how you taught the class change over time? I’m really curious about, you know, evolution in … of teaching, of preaching, you know, that we have many leaders and clergy folks who, you know, listen to our podcast, and folks who have to often do the same kinds of things repeatedly, longitudinally through time. I’m I always love hearing how, how teachers and leaders change things. So, you know, what did you learn, and what did you adjust over time as you taught at a second and third? 

D:           Yeah. So I think, you know, I think the first time around, I had so few resources to work with because the books had just come out. No one had written anything. I had not written anything. And so I was really having to pull together other resources to make the class work. And the longer I was teaching it, the more I could pull on my own writing, the more I could pull on some other scholarship. But to be honest, the, you know, the wave of books that came out, A lot of them came out after I stopped teaching the class. And so I was still having to kind of pull theology books and then say, okay. Here’s a theology text. Now you make the leap. And in some ways, that was very good for students. Yeah. 

               I think the elephant in this conversation is that one of the big changes in how we think about the books is how JK Rowling has spoken publicly. If not about the books, then about her views on social issues in the past few years. And I had stopped teaching the class by then. I wasn’t living near New Haven anymore. I wasn’t living in New England, and I was teaching at a seminary down in Texas where I was teaching grad school pastoral theology classes. So I thought a lot about how I would teach the class now if I taught it. And, I, you know, I feel like it’s such … I think you would have to have a class on JK Rowling, and what she’s said about social issues.

               But to me, you know, I’ve heard some of the stars of this of the movie say, you know, regardless of the statement she’s made about gender issues, the books are still really powerful transformative books. And when I hear that, I think it raises this really important issue about how we read anybody’s text. Do we read it with the author’s intention? Do we read the book as a book apart from its author? One of my favorite book series are the Neapolitan novels, and they’re written by an anonymous author very recently who said I want nothing to do with this. Like, I couldn’t have written the books if my name was attached to them, and books stand on their own. 

               And I do tend to be a believer that books stand on their own as their own being apart from their author. And, and also you get, you know, a truthful and really interesting read when you take the author’s view into account. So I think if I was gonna teach it now, I probably would have a class on what are different ways of reading this text, what’s at stake if we read it in different ways. Because, you know, JK Rowling has given us a lot to work with, with her own beliefs, and so it becomes a question we have to ask that we wouldn’t be asking of an author like Elena Ferrante of the Neapolitan novels who has really kept her identity secret from the reader.

               

H:           So I would probably do that. And it’s a live question in theology. I mean, we wonder a lot about New Testament authors, but even one of the weirdest experiences of this I’ve had was a graduate seminar when I was a grad student that was all about Karl Barth’s personal life. And the other woman in the room, because there were two of us, raised her hand and said, does any of this … should any of this affect the way we read the Church 

Dogmatics? And the person just went, nope. Okay. Afterwards, we kind of had to debrief. Like, that was weird. Right? 

D:           Well, and it’s interesting for me as someone who writes books myself to think about … I, you know, I put something on the page very carefully for a reason. And so, you know, but then do I expect the reader to extrapolate what was going through my head, or do I expect them to read what’s on the page? And, yeah. I mean, it’s just such an interesting set of questions. So yeah. 

B:            I wonder if, because there’s so much to talk about. You’ve written about so many different things. I have a sense we could talk for hours, but I wonder if if we could focus on some of your work in trauma and ministry and and trauma-informed ministry. And maybe you could share a little bit, about what it’s like teaching about trauma-informed ministry, what that is. And also I have a curiosity about how the word trauma is being used in our culture today. I’m, you know, simultaneously really thankful that we can have really open and honest conversations about trauma, and I’m a little maybe concerned that the word trauma gets thrown around so often, perhaps diluting, you know, its power … and maybe even ends up rendering folks invisible who’ve actually gone through something really traumatic in their lives. So there’s a lot there. I wonder if you can sort of speak in this general direction. 

D:           Yeah. So I have so much to say about this, and it’s such a great, it’s such a great question. So one of my colleagues, I think, had a really astute observation that she shared, a year or two ago where she said, “We used to live in a society where nothing was trauma, and now we live in a society where everything is trauma.” And, you know, I think the benefit of living in the society that we live in is that we’re not putting things in a closet or hiding them. We’re more open to having conversations about instances that really are traumatic. You know, but to your point, you know, I use an example in the book of walking down a street and hearing a student say, oh, the test I just took was so traumatic, and say it kind of in a jokey way. And so clearly, that’s different than a, you know, a traumatic event that kind of, really, really wrecks a person’s world. And so then we have to ask kind of what the difference is. Are both of these trauma? What is trauma? And so at some level, experts have not agreed on what trauma is.

               If you read, you know, a literary theorist named Kathy Carruth, she defines trauma as something being missed in an event, and it’s the experience of missing something crucial that causes you to kind of cycle back to it again and again to try to figure out what you missed. There are philosophers like Susan Bryson who say no, no, no; definitely nothing was missed. In fact, things you have a hyper-awareness of certain parts of the trauma. So it’s not what was missed that’s causing you to cycle back. It’s that hyperawareness that’s causing you to cycle back. Then there are, you know, psychiatrists like Bessel van der Kolk, who’s really focusing on the embodied experience of trauma, and then psychiatrists like Judith Herman, who are focusing on the narrative effects of trauma, how trauma really stops a person’s story and challenges understandings of themselves. 

               And then if you look at the, you know, the psych psychological community’s definition of, post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s really important to look at what’s present in that definition and then what’s not present. So what is not present in that definition are a list of events that are traumatic. What is present are reactions to events, even though the events are never specified. So what the psychological community is saying is we cannot look at an event and say that will necessarily produce a reaction. Instead, you know, a whole wide variety of events can produce a reaction. Here’s what the reaction looks like. We need to look at impact. 

               And I think that’s right, because people bring all sorts of resources or lack thereof to a given experience. So, you know, if you have a, you know, a brain that happens to have the benefit of being very resilient, you’re less likely to experience something as a trauma. If you have experienced traumatic events before or things that your brain processes as a trauma, you know, you might come to a new potential traumatic event with those in your background, and that’s gonna influence how you’re viewing what you’re seeing. Right?

               So, you know, the other example I give is my daughter and I were in a car once, and I collided with a deer. And so my daughter came home from that and said, “Mommy hit a deer.” And I said to my husband, “No. I did not hit a deer. The deer hit the car. Like, very crucial distinction. The deer hit the car.” And my daughter said, “No, no, no. Mommy hit the deer.” So, like, who’s correct here? I mean, I’m in the driver’s seat. I know what I did with the steering wheel. I know how this deer jumped out of a ditch, in a way that made it impossible for it not to collide with my car even though I swerved away. So, you know, I took active steps not to collide with the deer, but the deer made the choice to jump out of the ditch. So to my mind, the deer hit me or hit the car. From her perspective, that is not what happened. 

               Now am I skewing things because I don’t wanna see myself as a deer murderer, or she was three at the time and in the back seat, does she not have the perspective to bring to the situation that would give truthful information? Is anyone gonna ask the deer? Like, so you can see there are a lot of reasons why we process the same experience differently. We have different things that are at stake. We bring different wisdom. And for all those reasons, one thing that theorists do tend to agree upon is that we cannot define an event as an event as being traumatic. It’s a person’s reaction to it. 

               I am skirting around your question, but I’m not skirting around your question. I’m giving a lot of accurate information to ultimately say, the definition that I use, kind of pulls from other experts and scholars and hopefully brings together, their wisdom, but it’s very much my definition because there isn’t a universal agreement. So my definition is that a trauma is a highly distressing event or series of events that occurs in the life of an individual or community that overwhelms their capacity to cope, often because of a threat to their lives and what is most meaningful to them. So what my definition is highlighting here is that events in and of themselves are not traumatic. What makes them traumatic is that a person’s ability to cope is overwhelmed by them. 

               So a person experiences an event, and their coping mechanisms are not up to the task of alleviating that distress. That can often occur because of a physical threat to their to their life or to a threat to their sense of meaning … can occur for all sorts of reasons. But the other thing that I highlight in this definition is that a trauma can be individual or it can be communal. And we know that traumas, you know, travel across time, that there’s intergenerational trauma. I call that a vertical dimension to trauma. And there’s also a horizontal dimension. The idea that, you know, trauma has a locus, but then it percolates throughout a community. So, you know, I think that if we apply that definition, it helps us put some boundaries around, you know, what is trauma and what is stress.

               Because a stressful event kind of involves the use of coping mechanisms, but not the complete overwhelm that a trauma does. So, I give the example in the book of a person taking a science test. And if they show up to take the test, they might find the test stressful whether they studied or not. But if they studied, then, you know, they have resources that they can bring to bear, and the kind of stress they’re feeling is actually a productive stress. Right? It might help them write faster. You know, their brain is really on fire. That’s not the kind of stress that’s traumatic. That’s the kind of stress where your system is capable of coping with it.

               So that’s how I explain the different the difference between stress and trauma. And I think when people are using that term trauma in, an overly broad way, I think sometimes what they really mean to say is this was stressful in some way. 

H:           Yeah. Yeah. 

B:            That’s helpful.

H:           Yeah. Something that I think is important about the definition, but I think can be easily heard wrong about this medical definition, is it– maybe I’m just competitive. Like, well, if I’m resilient enough, if I have enough skills, then I’ll never be traumatized. But I don’t think that’s really the point of the definition. I think it’s more about actual things happening in your brain that affect your being as a result of tough things that people encounter in life. 

D:           I don’t think there’s any human being who isn’t capable of having their coping mechanisms overwhelmed. You know, different things will overwhelm different people, but, but nobody is immune from that. 

H:           Mhmm. So, okay, I wanna kind of shift gears and hear from you as seminary professor, former, of church leaders. What should people be keeping in mind in their ministries? We hear sometimes about trauma-informed pedagogy or trauma-informed management. What does trauma-informed pastoral care look like? And I kinda wanna ask, like, does a priest need to know whether a person fits the actual definition of trauma? And, also, how does a priest or fill-in-the-blank, other kind of leader react productively to somebody who’s experienced a traumatic event? 

D:           Yeah. So here’s my practical advice to faith leaders. I think it’s helpful for them to look over the definition of PTSD in the psychological manual just so they have those symptoms in their back pocket. And I think it’s really helpful for them to remember not everyone who experiences a trauma develops PTSD. A majority of people don’t. It depends on the kind of event that they’re experiencing, but the psychologist George Banano says, on average, about 30% of people who experience a trauma go on to develop PTSD. So a very practical takeaway: just have those symptoms in your back pocket. And when you’re just sort of with a person and trying to figure out, not if they have PTSD, but if they’re traumatized, to look for that overwhelmed sense of like, their coping mechanisms are overwhelmed. So here are some … here are some things that they might look for.

               Does the person have trouble speaking? Are they having trouble conceptualizing their– the event? Do they just flat out tell you, I’m overwhelmed? Right? I think many faith leaders have an experience of sitting with someone who says, I can’t make a decision about the funeral. I’m too overwhelmed. Right? So, so just looking for that basic that basic experience that we’ve all had at some point of just being that overwhelmed. 

               So what do you do for the person who’s that overwhelmed? I think there are three things that, that a faith leader can do, and they can do them in this order.

               The first one is help the person or community they’re caring for find a sense of safety. So this is an idea I take from a psychiatrist named Judith Herman. She’s been really important in my work. She has studied trauma for decades and says this is an effective first stage for healing, is providing someone with safety. And that safety has to be holistic. So it has to be physical. It has to be psychological. But it also has to be spiritual. So I think one of the unique things a faith leader can do is provide that spiritual sense of safety. How do they do that? At a very basic level, they can be a safe presence themselves. And you know, faith leaders learn all of that in a good Intro to Pastoral Care class, how to be that safe resource for people. You know, you don’t abuse power. You don’t act inappropriately in the workplace. You create a system in the place where you’re serving that’s healthy and life giving. You’re welcoming of whoever comes through your door. You, you know, recognize the dignity of every human being. You know, these are all things that can help create spiritual safety. 

               Also, engaging in grounding practices with someone: centering prayer, a meditative walk. You know, if it feels useful to someone, you know, praying passages of the Bible if they are meaningful to them, if they’re meaningful and feel safe to them. These sorts of grounding things, yoga, deep breathing, all of these provide kind of a psycho-spiritual sense of safety. 

               Faith leaders can also help create physical safety by, you know, making sure, you know, that the person is going back to live in an environment that is physically safe, and they can ask about that. And if that is not something the person is receiving, they can help with those resources. I didn’t lead with that because many other people can do that. I wanted to really highlight the unique things a spiritual care provider can do, but they absolutely should be checking to see, is this person physically safe? And is the person psychologically safe? Are they in an abusive environment in some way that is, you know, that is emotionally abusive, and what kind of resources can we get to get them out of there?

               So that’s the first thing. The second stage is the meaning-making stage, and I tend to find with my students this is the place they are most comfortable. A lot of them come to seminary because they love spiritual meaning making, and they’re good at it, and they wanna help others with it. My biggest comment to them is you have to let the person you’re caring for do the work. You cannot give the meaning to them. You can journey alongside them. You can ask the right questions. Again, see your Intro to Pastoral Care class. You can be a great active listener. You cannot impose that meaning because just because it works for you does not mean it is gonna work for them.

               And then the third stage is reconnection. And, so Judith Herman talks about reconnecting with yourself, and then reconnecting with your community. And, again, if you’re in a faith environment or serving as a chaplain somewhere where you see people regularly, like a school, that reconnecting with the community is something that, you know, can be really enduring and long-term. If you’re somewhere like a hospital, you’re a hospital chaplain, you know, you’re gonna start with that safety, and you might never get beyond it. And that is fine. I cannot emphasize that safety piece enough. Nothing else can happen without it. So if you’re a faith leader and you’re listening and you’re gonna have one takeaway, it’s that that ability to give someone that safety, is the most important thing you can do. 

H:           So that was so beautiful, so perfectly packaged. And I wonder if we can ask you about one more thing while we have you here. Because this summer, you edited an issue of a journal about abortion, and I think we’ve heard so much politically about abortion. And, I mean, frankly, this is something that faith leaders are also going to be coming across in their ministry. We just heard the results of the presidential election at the time of recording, and I think it’s on people’s minds. I think since the loudest Christian voices on the topic of abortion tend to be, like, one very specific well-known thing. I’m just wondering if you can kind of tell us a little bit about what you found editing that issue of the Anglican Theological Review in terms of what an Anglican theology of abortion is or isn’t, or what do we know about what our theology is? What don’t we know? 

D:           Yeah. You know, I started preparations to edit that issue around the time that Dobbs was overturned. And one of the great gifts about editing is that I got to see everyone’s writing and curate it and help folks express their own ideas. And I wanted to do that because one of the … one of the reasons I love being an Episcopalian is that Episcopalians don’t generally come out with very hard-hitting, you know, statements that allow no room to breathe and no flexibility. I think we really try to cast a wide net while valuing the dignity of every human being. And what I found when I looked at the Episcopal Church’s statements on abortion is that they were very inconsistent. So it wasn’t a wide net. It was a confusing net. And I thought if I was gonna look to guidance from these, I would be befuddled.

               And so, you know, what resources do we have that might help us think productively about an issue that, that affects, you know, not just anyone who can carry a child, but anyone who cares about anyone who can carry a child. So, you know, I think we tend to think of abortions as something that happens within a particular pregnancy that then has to be responded to, without looking at the broader picture of someone’s reproductive life. To say, actually, a person has a period every month of their life, which means they have to prevent a pregnancy every month of their life. And that’s a lot of pregnancies that you’re gonna have to … not have one way or another. Right? If women actually or if people could carry pregnancies actually carried every pregnancy to term that they could in their reproductive years, I think it’s something like twelve or fourteen children would be the average number that that a person had.

               So there has … you know, unless you want a society where people are having that many children as a matter of course, you know, we have to ask the question of what is … a faithful way to create a family or not create a family and engage in reproduction. And so that’s why the issue was important to me to curate. I think one of the things that I learned from the authors I worked with is that the Episcopal and Anglican tradition have some really unique resources in terms of how we value discernment. We’ve always been a tradition that really values discernment. That’s something that, Jenny Leith and Karen O’Donnell wrote about in their essay. And so thinking about what discernment looks like here, because, you know, we have to ask, is that communal discernment? Is it discernment within …  you know, just the individual who’s carrying the pregnancy? You know, so asking, what does discernment look like, and how do we teach people to discern? I think that’s a fair question. No one wants to make a decision about anything that isn’t well reasoned, abortion or not abortion. So how do we teach people to discern? 

               And something that’s really interesting to me, is what are the barriers that keep us from discerning well? So I’m really interested in something called epistemic injustice, and it’s forms of injustice that affect our ways of knowing. And so I’m really interested in the kinds of things that that cast a shadow or a lens over how we know. And if we … if we’re not discerning knowledge correctly, then our discernment is not gonna be very good. So I think one thing that I think is worth highlighting is the question of how we discern and what it means to discern. The other … another essay that really caught my attention was one that Lauren Winter wrote about liturgy, and she talks about the Enriching Our Worship liturgies and that these liturgies contain a section where women can repent for the sin of abortion. And says, this is the only place in our tradition where we have written a liturgy to repent for a specific sin, right? Our Rite of Repentance does not outline specific sins. So it’s only there. And she, you know, kind of concludes, I think we have to ask ourselves what the significance of that is and what we’re saying there and just is it what we want to say. So, I …  you know, I really hadn’t spent enough time with those liturgies to realize that that was embedded in them. And so I … given how much our tradition uses liturgy so well as a primary source of our theology, it becomes really important for us to think about that in particular.

H:           Yeah. At the very least, weird. Yeah.

D:           It’s just surprising. Yeah. Mhmm.

B:             Yeah. Well, I wonder if someone who has positioned themselves so close to trauma and so close to the suffering of humanity, I wonder in your teaching, in your ministry, where you’re finding hope and joy and and beauty as a teacher, as a theologian, as a Christian. 

D:           Yeah. You know, I think I have learned a lot in the past eight years in particular about this. And, I have been … I’ve done a big shift in time for myself that I think eight years ago, which was around the time our family moved to Texas, I had big hopes for who I was gonna be, who my children were gonna be, who our world was gonna be. And I have a very different timeline for those hopes now. But I don’t … I don’t feel that the hopes have gone away. I still feel very firmly that I believe in our Episcopal commitment, that we honor the dignity of every human being because we believe that human beings are fundamentally good. I see so many decisions that are, to me, feel like they’re being made by people who are very hurt, who are very traumatized, that are very reactive. And, and I think that that goes back further than eight years ago.

               I think it goes quite a ways back, that we have a society in general that, that has a lot of societal trauma we’re too afraid to unpackage for various reasons. And I think that because of that, you know, people feel powerless, and they feel, afraid on both sides of the aisle. And it still feels very much to me like when we understand people as being hurt that way, it helps me to see them as humans. And I have been very intentional about developing healthy coping resources for myself. And naming for myself, Oh, this is where I experience safety. This is how I can help calibrate my nervous system and my spiritual life to be grounded even when there’s a lot of whirling storminess around me. 

               And, so I, you know, I look at the world we live in now, and I find hope in that … you know, I feel like I have a toolkit for weathering some of this. And I think a lot of us have that toolkit whether we’re naming it for ourselves or not. Maybe we need to bring it to our awareness a little more. But, but I think a lot of us have that toolkit. And, I followed Becca Stevens on Instagram. She had this beautiful Instagram quotation the day before the election, and she said, “You know, tomorrow, I’m getting up, and I’m going to work. And I went to work. I went to work in in the Trump administration, in the Biden administration, in the Obama administration, in the Clinton administration, in the Bush administration because the need is still there. And I will work with anyone who cares about, you know, women who have been trafficked and prostituted, you know, to help with their healing.” And, I mean, I liked that post so quickly because, you know, you know, we can control getting up in the morning and do the work–doing the work that we’re called to do. And, you know, it’s hopeful to me that we’re called to do it, and it’s hopeful to me that we get up every morning and do it. 

H:           Yeah. Oh my goodness. Thank you for joining us. I hope there’s a part two unpacking even more of this sometime. 

B:            Oh, I hope so. 

D:           It’s such a joy to be back with my Yale-y people and 

B:            Yay. 

H:           Oh my goodness. And Brandon and I are just collecting Atlanta friends, so we’re gonna have to pilgrimage.

B:            Yay. Road trip. 

H:           Road trip. 

D:           Yay. I’d love that. Come on down anytime.

H:           Mhmm. Gosh. That is such a rich conversation, and I’m so grateful for it. I thought we could bring it together by having a moment of reflection. This week, I’d really like to share a poem that has been meaningful to me and to a friend of mine who I’ve walked through some dark places with.

This is a poem called Prayer Walk. It’s like Prayer/Walk. Something you’re into, Brandon. The prayer-slash walk. This is a poem by Malcolm Gite.

A hidden path that starts at a dead end, 

old ways renewed by walking with a friend 

and crossing places taken hand in hand, 

the passages where nothing need be said, 

with bruised and scented sweetness underfoot and unexpected birdsong overhead, 

the sleeping life beneath a dark mouthed burrow, 

the rooted secrets wrestling in the hedgerow. 

A hedgerow. (Gonna say that again.) 

The rooted secrets wrestling in a hedgerow. 

The land’s long memory in ridge and furrow, 

a track once eaten and now overgrown 

with complex textures, every kind of green.

Land and cloudscape melting into one. 

The rich meandering of streams at play, 

a setting out to find oneself astray 

and coming home at dusk a different way. 

B:            Thanks. I needed that image of walking with a friend. I hope that this podcast feels like that for folks. I know it does for me. 

H:           Thanks for listening to the Leaders Way podcast. You can learn more about this episode at berkeleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast. Follow along with us on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast.

B:            And you can rate and review us on your podcast app, and be sure to hit follow so you never miss an episode. And if you liked this episode, please share it with a friend. 

H:           Until next time. 

B:            Peace be with you.

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