Abstract
In Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence, Matthew Sanford describes his journey through a traumatic car accident that killed his father and his sister and left him paralyzed from the chest down.1 According to Sanford, his immediate coping response (encouraged by doctors and therapists) was to act as if his body had betrayed him and to use his willpower to force his body to deal with the new realities of paralysis. Several years after the accident, however, Sanford took up the practice of yoga and discovered a new way of being in his material body. This new understanding of his body suggested that he had to recover not only from the trauma of the accident but also from the trauma of attempting to disengage from his body in his “recovery.” Rather than allowing his body to adapt to its new reality, Sanford argues that he was encouraged to attempt to overcome his body’s new limitations through a feat of willpower and, thereby, inflicted further trauma on his body. As an alternative to the infliction of further trauma on traumatized bodies, Sanford argues that bodies are incredibly adaptive and should be allowed to adapt to new realities in time. All kinds of deaths occur in the midst of our embodied lives but, rather than responding by subordinating bodies (and death) to willpower, Sanford suggests that we should allow those deaths to make us more aware of the reality that we are embodied beings.
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Notes
Matthew Sanford, Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence (Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books, 2008).
Bruce Marshall, Trinity and Truth, Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 259.
George Lakeoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 17.
Laurel Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (New York: Routledge, 2008), 129.
John Polkinghorne, “The Demise of Democritus,” in Trinity in an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology, ed. John Polkinghorne (Cambridge, and Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 6.
See, for example, Marc Pugliese, The One, The Many, and The Trinity: Joseph A. Bracken and the Challenge of Process Metaphysics (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2011), 123;
Joseph Bracken and Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, eds. Trinity in Process: A Relational Theology of God (New York: Continuum, 1997).
Joseph Bracken, The Divine Matrix: Creativity as Link between East and West (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995), 64. Also see Pugliese, 78.
See Jeanine Thweatt-Bates, Cyborg Selves: A Theological Anthropology of the Posthuman (Burlington, VT, Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2012).
Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (New York, Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2010), 298–299.
Sharon V. Betcher, Spirit and the Politics of Disablement (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 65.
Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2010), 144.
John Zizioulas, “Relational Ontology: Insights from Patristic Thought,” in The Trinity and an Entangled World: Relationality in Physical Science and Theology, ed. John Polkinghorne (Cambridge and Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 150.
Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1990, 1978), 38 and
Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: Crossroad, 2002, 1992), 45. These texts are discussed more fully in the first chapter.
Kevin Minister, “Organizing as the Occupation of Liberation Theology,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 64:2–3 (2013): 22–32.
See Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui-lan, Occupy Religion: Theology of the Multitude (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012).
See, for example, Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2006), Kindle Edition, Location 2144–2347.
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 24–28, 39–51.
See Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s editorial in The Revolution on October 21, 1869 in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds. History of Women’s Suffrage In Three Volumes, Volume II: 1861–1876 (Rochester, 1881), Location 8070, Kindle Book;
William Carlos Martyn, Wendell Phillips: The Agitator (New York and London: Funk and Wagnalls, 1890), 367.
See Nicola Creegan and Christine Pohl’s critique of this phenomenon in evangelical communities. Pohl and Creegan, “Where Are the Good Women?” in Living On the Boundaries: Evangelical Women, Feminism, and the Theological Academy (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005), 9–30.
Elliott Femynye Bat Tzedek, “The Rights and Wrongs of Identity Politics and Sexual Identities,” Off Our Backs 30:1 (2000): 8–9, 13, 20.
Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory, Corporealities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 22.
This argument is also made by queer theorists such as Marcella Althaus-Reid. See Marcella Althaus-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 2000).
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© 2014 Meredith Minister
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Minister, M. (2014). Epistemology, Ontology, Ethics, and Politics of the Material Trinity. In: Trinitarian Theology and Power Relations. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137464781_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137464781_7
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