Christian social ethics presently confronts a challenge: how to speak to a world of complex problems and deep suffering in a way that bridges the structural and the individual, the scholarly and the lived, the Christian tradition and its pluriform witnesses. Stephanie C. Edwards addresses this challenge through a carefully developed method and a carefully researched study of the confluence of trauma and memory in articulating a Christian social ethic.

The book is divided into five main chapters. The first chapter (“From Trauma Basics to a Christian Social Ethic of Memory”) provides a series of helpful introductions to modern academic studies of trauma (biological, social, and cultural), summaries of recent criticisms of trauma studies, and accounts of the structure and meaning of memory. In each case, Edwards offers initial indications, both theological and ethical, of why Christian theologians should be interested in these topics. The second chapter (“Womanist Ethics and Traumatic Memory”) explores themes in recent womanist ethics that suggest helpful connections to trauma studies, with particular attention to embodiment and the interpretation of flesh—one’s own, one’s neighbor’s, one’s group’s—to articulate a response to trauma characterized by “healing without forgetting” (67). The third chapter (“The ‘Traumatic Imagination’: Trauma as Theological Hermeneutic”) turns to the tradition of philosophical hermeneutics and its appropriation by theologians to “read and act with a particular preunderstanding of time, position, and praxis that can open spaces and co-create new ways of being and being-with that strive toward flourishing” (124). The fourth chapter (“Reading Liberative Theologies with a Trauma Lens: Metz and Trauma’s ‘Dangerous Memory’”) examines how theologies address particular human sufferings and the place that memory holds in the process of interpreting and then addressing individual and communal suffering. Edwards’s concern here is that the suffering accompanying both individual and communal trauma has the capacity to be carried forward as a partner in healing. “The practice of ‘dangerous memory’ can interpret trauma for the individual as well as the community and embolden an ethic of resistance to the causes of suffering throughout the world” (127). In the fifth chapter (“Christian Enfleshed Counter-Memory”), Edwards refines her account of the kind of remembering necessary to address trauma and draw life from it for individual and communities. “If we are remembering for life, then our pursuit of an ethic of traumatic memory can be framed in ways that alleviate as much suffering as possible and encourage positive individual growth, while simultaneously calling communities toward relationship and responsibility” (170). As a Christian social ethic, enfleshed counter-memory is directed to justice in three ways: “(1) empowerment of individual agency and integrity as a self, (2) community support and participation in re/integration of persons, and (3) solidarity and the preferential option for the poor” (197).

Edwards has written a beautifully crafted, methodologically refined, and prophetically inspired text in Christian ethics. Its virtues are many: timeliness in expanding theological reflection on trauma’s connection to memory and embodiment, showing the deep resonances between womanist ethics and philosophical hermeneutics, and illustrating how the connection between personal and social dimensions of liberation theology requires an account of the remembering self, positioned within communities of memory who must continually struggle to interpret, claim, and draw strength from the challenging—even dangerously transformative—memories of their pasts. Given the range of conversations engaged (womanist ethics, liberation theology, philosophies of trauma and memory), there are bound to be readers who will require additional work on specific thinkers and their arguments, perhaps even recommending other thinkers not sufficiently covered. (Diana Hayes’s discussion of the interplay of family biographies and religious traditions’ moral exemplars or Paul Ricoeur’s account of meaningful action considered as a text both would have added support to the rich analysis provided here.) This reviewer also would have welcomed more memory-evoking vignettes such as those from El Salvador, New Orleans, and Boston from 2005 to 2013 that draw the reader into lived experience that give rise to the book’s animating questions. These few minor issues aside, this book succeeds in its stated purpose: “Our shared stories of precarity are the ‘why’ of this book: attempting to reckon with deeply personal tragedy and with the massive, global, and systemic trauma intertwined within” (xiii). Edwards has shown us how to reflect on individual and communal suffering in a way that respects, empowers, and invites deeper reflection on the complex personal and structural realities that Christians live and serve.