“Trauma” and “abuse”: two dark words that describe the experience of a vast number of devastated people throughout the world. Unless we rightly understand the psychospiritual impact of this ordeal, our Christian response, however good-hearted, may not be helpful. Our aim is to bring understanding where ignorance can be seriously damaging both to individuals who are not understood and to the whole body of Christ, where the disconnections caused by traumatic wounding make us corporately less than we are destined to be as “the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:23 ESV). There is a Light that no darkness will ever extinguish and a Life in him that death cannot destroy. 

Stephen Williams, who is from Wales, is Honorary Professor of Theology at Queen’s University, Belfast and Emeritus Professor of Systematic Theology at Union Theological College, Belfast, the seminary of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. He received his Ph.D from Yale University and has taught and published in the areas of theology, bioethics and intellectual history. He is married to Susan and they have three grown-up children and two grand-children.

Susan, who is from Virginia, is a graduate of Yale Divinity School and received her Ph.D from the University of Ulster for narrative research carried out in the Regional Intensive Care Unit at the Royal Hospital in Belfast. It was subsequently published as Life after a Critical Incident in Hospital: an Exploration in the Language of Trauma (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010). She works privately as a pastoral counsellor, specializing in acute and developmental trauma.