by Hilary Scarsella

The wisdom you’ve gathered along your journey of healing can help transform the ways we think about God and faith. I invite you to contribute to a collaborative project that takes the experiences of survivors as important sources for doing theology (i.e. thinking about God in ways that breathe love and life into all).

I’m working on my PhD in theology at Vanderbilt University, and I’m doing this work because I want to make space for the voices of survivors to reshape the systems of belief that define communities of faith. Over the next few years, I’ll be seeking out survivors’ theological wisdom on a number of themes, and right now I’d like to invite anyone who is interested to talk to me about your thoughts on Jesus – his life, death, resurrection, and his significance in your own story of harm and/or healing.

You don’t need to know a thing about theology to contribute! You don’t need to have pre-formed thoughts about Jesus to share. The fact that you are a survivor makes you perfectly qualified, and I’ll supply questions for you to reflect on.

Please comment here [on the Mennonite Women Voices blog] or click here to email me, Hilary Scarsella, directly if you are interested. Your anonymity will be protected, and I will be in touch with you about the details. We can set up a time for a phone conversation. Or, if you prefer, I can send you a list of questions that you can reflect on and respond to by email. If you want to talk more in order to decide whether or not you want to participate, I welcome that conversation as well.

My deadline for collecting responses is March 31^st.

Again: You don’t need to know anything about theology to contribute. All you need is a willingness to share your own honest experience with the Jesus story and a desire for the church to learn from survivors.