This powerful last work by pioneering oral historian Fran Leeper Buss examines how painful memories of traumatic experiences can be transformed into positive action for social good. In her more than 40 years gathering the life stories of working-class women, Buss found commonalities in the ways in which her subjects faced structural inequalities of race, class, and gender, as well as sufferings caused by poverty, child abuse, gun violence and war. Some of these women subsequently went on to become participants and leaders in a variety of movements for social change. In this wide-ranging book, Buss shows how her subjects employed storytelling, art, spirituality and other methods to create sense and meaning from traumatic memories and then make positive contributions to movements for labor rights, sanctuary for Central American refugees, gun violence prevention, peace, and other causes. Buss also relates her own story of medical malpractice and disability and discusses the work of historical and contemporary thinkers on the concepts underlying her ideas. She provides unique and original insights into how women who have endured great trauma are able to redeem their memories through communal action for a better world.

This book consists of ten essays that examine the ways in which language has been used to evoke what Lawrence L. Langer calls the ‘deathscape’ and the ‘hopescape’ of the Holocaust. The chapters in this collection probe the diverse impacts that site visits, memoirs, survivor testimonies, psychological studies, literature and art have on our response to the atrocities committed by the Germans during World War II. Langer also considers the misunderstandings caused by erroneous, embellished and sentimental accounts of the catastrophe, and explores some reasons why they continue to enter public and printed discourse with such ease.

Redeeming Memory is about memory and what the Bible has to say about it. This book examines how God transforms memories from a heavy burden to a blessed hope. Memory plays an important role in the Christian life both in its proper function but also in its corruption. This book is written for Christians who suffer knowingly or unknowingly from the heavy burdens of memory like grumbling, nostalgia, bitterness, regret, shame, as well as future fears of futility and insignificance. God removes these heavy burdens by His mercy at the cross and redeems memory back to its original purpose, to glorify and worship Him.

Though the church has often been complicit in regimes of domination that have perpetrated abuse, persecution, and violence, Keshgegian reminds us that the witness of the church is to remember for transformation. Such remembrance is shaped by the narrative of Jesus' life and ministry, death and resurrection--knit together in the promise of incarnation. The church as a community of remembrance honors and preserves memories of suffering, evokes and validates memories of resistance, and actively supports, embodies, and celebrates memories of connection and life affirmation. In particular, Keshgegian draws our attention to those who have suffered childhood sexual abuse, victims of the Armenian genocide and the Jewish Holocaust, and other historically disinherited peoples and groups. With such powerful memories of suffering in mind, she insists that redeeming memories is the purpose and mission of the church. Keshgegian challenges us to understand that the redemptive potential of the memory of Jesus Christ will be made known and realized by the capacity of that memory to hold and carry not only the story of Jesus, but of all those who suffer, struggle, live, and die. "In Redeeming Memories Keshgegian contributes a unique and well-developed amendment to the growing literature on theologies of memory. Too often, she notes, experiences of suffering and abuse are treated as though they are absolute. Yet these experiences characteristically encompass ambiguity and doubt. In order to 'face the past in new ways,' survivors must first enter back into their experiences, 'undigested and disconnected,' without certainty. Transformation occurs when it is not only the suffering that is remembered, but when 'instances of resistance and agency' are incorporated into the 'testimony and witness.' Keshgegian develops her understanding of how remembering is redemptive in two sections. The first considers contemporary movements of communities that have suffered childhood sexual abuse, the Armenian genocide and the Jewish holocaust, and historical marginalization. Keshgegian herself is Armenian, drawing from a wealth of examples from her family's stories in explaining her understanding of the dynamics of remembering. In part two, she turns to a theological reconstruction of memory, where we are called to understand witness as 'withness' that moves beyond solidarity with victims to 'active participation in redemption.' We are charged also to tell the story of Jesus Christ in complex ways that honor the fullness of life as well as the cross. Finally, we are invited to understand worship as a time when 'we remember God and God remembers us'--the church as a place where remembering past suffering walks hand-in-hand with responding to present need. Keshgegian's book is beautifully written and well argued, compelling us to enter into the ambiguous, redemptive work of memory it so well describes."--Cynthia Rigby, Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, in Religious Studies Review, Volume 29 Number 3, July 2003.

This monograph explores how the constitutional courts in the United States, Germany, and South Africa have invoked slavery, Nazism, and apartheid - three historical evils - as an aid in constitutional interpretation. It examines how the memory of evil pasts moulds constitutional meaning in the contested present.

A holistic view of human development that rejects the conventional stages of childhood, adulthood, and old age When we talk about human development, we tend to characterize it as proceeding through a series of stages in which we are first children, then adolescents, and finally, adults. But as James Bernard Murphy observes, growth is not limited to the young nor is decline limited to the aged. We are never trapped within the horizon of a particular life stage: children anticipate adulthood and adults recapture childhood. According to Murphy, the very idea of stages of life undermines our ability to see our lives as a whole. In Your Whole Life, Murphy asks: what accounts for the unity of a human life over time? He advocates for an unconventional, developmental story of human nature based on a nested hierarchy of three powers—first, each person's unique human genome insures biological identity over time; second, each person's powers of imagination and memory insure psychological identity over time; and, third, each person's ability to tell his or her own life story insures narrative identity over time. Just as imagination and memory rely upon our biological identity, so our autobiographical stories rest upon our psychological identity. Narrative is not the foundation of personal identity, as many argue, but its capstone. Engaging with the work of Aristotle, Augustine, Jesus, and Rousseau, as well as with the contributions of contemporary evolutionary biologists and psychologists, Murphy challenges the widely shared assumptions in Western thinking about personhood and its development through discrete stages of childhood, adulthood, and old age. He offers, instead, a holistic view in which we are always growing and declining, always learning and forgetting, and always living and dying, and finds that only in relation to one's whole life does the passing of time obtain meaning.

In response to challenges from the emerging world, this book brings together essays that discuss and exemplify various related approaches to academic faith integration and explore how Christian faith should underpin, scaffold, and frame our understanding of academic disciplines, leading to practical implications for work or action in modern society and culture. Written by Christian scholars and practitioners from diverse backgrounds including the USA, the UK, Australia, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, and the Philippines, the contributions here all contribute a global perspective while addressing some specific issue or case in the context of Asia. They represent ingenious endeavors that illustrate the workings of a faith-integrated approach in domains as wide as higher education, business, science, psychology and counseling, politics, environment, media, social services, leadership, research, and technology. This volume will inform and inspire the reader into cross-cultural and inter-disciplinary studies particularly of religion, education, culture, society, and worldview.