Post-Traumatic Jesus
Examines the historical social climate during Mary’s pregnancy and Jesus’ birth, life, and ministry, and how such a climate could have impacted Jesus and those around him.
Reader Recommendation: Post-Traumatic Jesus by David W. Peters
Recommended by: Laura DeMann
Why it might be helpful: It takes a deeper look into Jesus’ humanity and how he experienced the same pressures we experience today.
Post-Traumatic Jesus invites readers to look at the gospel narratives through the lens of trauma — not as a diminishment of Jesus’ divinity, but as a deepening of his humanity. David W. Peters draws on trauma studies and biblical scholarship to examine the social and historical conditions of first-century Palestine and how those conditions shaped Jesus’ life, relationships, and ministry. The result is a reading of the gospels that resonates with anyone who has lived through — or walked alongside others through — experiences of suffering and survival.
For Disciples preachers, this book opens up fresh homiletical territory. It provides language and frameworks for preaching the humanity of Jesus in ways that connect with congregants who carry their own trauma, and it invites preachers to consider how their own experiences of hardship and healing shape the word they bring.
You might also find helpful:
- Soul Injury: Healing the Relationship You Have With Yourself — A resource for preachers attending to their own inner wounds alongside their congregations.
- Indigo: The Color of Grief — A poetry-style book for preachers tending to their own grief while walking alongside others in theirs.
- Preaching Luke-Acts, by Ronald J. Allen — A Disciples scholar’s guide to the theological themes and homiletical possibilities of Luke and Acts.
Reader Recommendations are submitted by Disciples preachers and are not created or fully reviewed by the Proclamation Project.
