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Series:   Elements in the Problems of God

Religious Trauma

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2024

Michelle Panchuk
Michelle Panchuk
Affiliation:
Murray State University

Summary

When religion is the site of abuse and trauma, it can deeply impact a person's ability to relate to God and engage in spiritual practice. As such, religious trauma is ripe for philosophical exploration. Section 1 of this Element provides a brief history of the concept of psychological trauma, contemporary accounts of its neurobiological basis, and its impact on human agency. Section 2 sketches a model of religious trauma through the first-person narratives of survivors and emerging psychological data. Section 3 explores the social epistemology of religious trauma, focusing on how failures of knowledge create space for religious abuse and the insights of survivors may help communities guard against it. The last two sections consider three perennial topics in philosophy of religion from the perspective of religious trauma: the problem of evil, the problem of divine hiddenness, and religious experience.
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Keywords

religious traumaproblem of evilspiritual abusereligious experiencereligious epistemology
Type
Element
Information
Series: Elements in the Problems of God
Online ISBN: 9781009269643
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication: 16 January 2025

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