We should not, as philosophers of religion, accept self-serving (non)apologies that take no responsibility for concrete wrongs done and lack any evidence of genuine remorse, change, or making of amends. Predators don’t get to decide when enough time has passed to go back to business as usual.
Unspeakably cruel and inhumane.
“Chained for hours on a prison bus without access to food, water or a toilet. Told by guards to urinate on the floor. Held "like sardines in a jar," as many as 27 women in a small holding cell. Sleeping on a concrete floor.”
www.usatoday.com/story/news/n...
I wonder if this is a “pastor’s wife” thing as much as a “Christian wife” thing that is intensified by the expectation that the pastor’s wife will be the ideal embodiment of “Biblical Womahood™”
But it’s important we keep knowing what really happened.
Be tested because they sound like the missile sirens back home The trauma is as much the vicarious trauma of what the sound means for her grandchildren as it is the direct trauma of the days they spent fleeing the country.
Trump can say Ukraine started it. Some people will start to believe him.
a PoW in Russia. My husband’s closest friends have all joined up. One is on the front lines. His hometown has been bombed. His niece often sleeps in her bathtub through terrifying missile strikes. My MiL lives with us, and after two years I continue to let her know when the tornado sirens will...
and we sat on the phone as i watched footage on TV. I cried. He reported on his family’s plans. Over the next few days they fled the country. His nephew spent his days helping to evacuate people to the boarder. A formerly close friend has now been MIA for over a year. We hope he is dead and not..
the company was so good. Later, when I got back to my room, I had all these texts asking if my family was okay. Confused, I googled the news and discovered that Russia had invaded Ukraine without provocation. A line of tanks and soldiers was headed toward Kiev. I called my Ukrainian husband…
It’s important to keep repeating the reality of your lived experience and affirming it for others when being gaslighted. Here’s what i remember of the day when Russia invaded Ukraine.
I was at the APA hotel bar gabbing with Kate Norlock when my phone started blowing up, but i ignored it because…
the now-popular constructs of resilience, grit, and post-traumatic growth, which, alone, can lead to impoverished affective and epistemic relationships to evil and suffering.
Kate Manne had excellent blog post on the problem with resilience yesterday:
katemanne.substack.com/p/is-resilie...
distinguish my conception of flourishing from the veins of positive psychology that view "negative emotions" like anger, grief, and blame, as at best transient springboards to further positivity, and at worst as morally suspect affective states, and to distinguish post-traumatic flourishing from…
My project this semester is to write on the nature of spiritual flourishing, how religious trauma undermines it, and what sorts of practices and virtues might promote individual and collective flourishing in the aftermath of religious trauma. One of the biggest challenges I’m facing is to…
If you have read my Cambridge Element on Religious Trauma and are inclined to leave an Amazon, Goodreads, or StoryGraph review, I’d be grateful for the feedback and promotion!
www.cambridge.org/core/element...
(6/6) Parental rights are the primary frame, not the child’s experience of pain, suffering, fear, and violation. And so children (and former children) are left with few resources to make sense of harm that neither the state nor society nor language easily recognizes.
(5/6) health disorder). What stands out most is that both the dominant social discourse and much of existing legislation is constructed to answer the question, “How much should parents and guardians have *the right* to do to their children before the State intervenes?”
(4/6) If your lip was bloodied by a slap in the face, you were abused in Arkansas but not in Minnesota. If you were threatened with severe violence or a weapon but not actually injured, you were abused in Utah and Oklahoma, but not most other states (unless the threats caused a diagnosed mental…
(3/6) Was it bad enough? Does it count even if others had it worse? How does one quantify the impact of living in fear of one’s primary caregivers? The inconsistency in the laws across states adds to this problem. If the beatings only left mild bruising, you were abused in Delaware but not Wyoming.
(2/6) so too the social script of the abused child as bruised and bleeding, showing up at the hospital with yet another broken bone can make it difficult for those who experienced physical violations and violence without visible or lasting injury to understand and communicate their experience.
🧵1/6 As I have been reading Danielle Elizabeth Tumminio Hansen book, Speaking of Rape, it struck me that just as the myth of “real rape” can make it difficult for those who weren’t violently assaulted by a stranger in a dark alley to understand and communicate their experiences of sexual violation…
(7/7) So, yeah. Children in the US have fewer legal protections from violence than literally any other group.
(6/7) child by striking them on the face or head if they are under the age of 4 (for older kids it has to cause "serious injury" to count as abuse). In most states, emotional abuse has to cause either "delinquent" behavior or a diagnosed (often "severe") mental health disorder.
(5/7) harm or injury. Fewer than a handful of states consider the infliction of severe pain without lasting physical injury to be abuse. Only a few consider threats of serious physical violence (or threats with a weapon) to be forms of abuse. In one state it's only a crime to cause injury to a…
(4/7)from the definition of child abuse (the amount of pain you can inflict without leaving more than mild bruising and transient marks is actually quite high, especially if that is your goal). A majority have religious exceptions to laws against medical neglect even when it results in serious…
(3/7) But, a majority of states define abuse as causing "lasting or permanent injury" or result in "substantial impairment of a bodily organ." Multiple states explicitly exclude "mild bruising" and "transient marks and swelling" inflicted by "reasonable and moderate corporal punishment"…
(2/7) removal of children from good parents. For these I'm grateful. There are also lot of states where the language is so broad and vague that without any knowledge of case law and interpretive precedents, it's hard to know what protections they actually provide for children.
Content Note: Child abuse
🧵(1/7) I just finished reading the child abuse laws of all 50 states. It is so grim. There are a few states that have robust protections. There are a few that have laws that specifically respond to the ways that poverty, disability, and culture have been used to justify…
3 bar graphs are pictured. 1) “Top Surgeries. U.S. Patients ages 13-17 undergoing mastectomy with prior gender dysphoria diagnosis. 2019: 238. 2020: 256. 2021: 282” 2) “Puberty Blockers. U.S. Patients ages 6-17 with prior gender dysphoria diagnosis initiating puberty blocker treatment. 2017: 633. 2018: 759. 2019: 897. 2020: 1101. 2021: 1390.” 3) “Hormone Therapy. U.S. Patients ages 6-17 with prior gender dysphoria diagnosis initiating hormone treatment. 2017: 1905. 2018: 2391. 2019: 3036. 2020: 3163. 2021: 4231.”
(5/5) Again, if this data is representative, that would mean there were about 468 total gender-affirming top surgeries done in 2019 on cisgender boys. Below is more comprehensive data on the 3 kinds of gender affirming care for trans minors accessed over the past several years.
(4/5) 272 total gender-affirming surgical procedures performed on trans and gender diverse minors in the US in 2019. The study also found that 146 cisgender boys had gender-affirming breast reductions.
(3/5) None of these procedures were performed on children under the age of 13, 3 were on minors ages 13 and 14, and the rest were on minors 15-17. 82 of the 85 procedures were top surgeries. If this sample is representative of the general US population, that would mean that there were about
(2/5) The most comprehensive study I found (Dai et al 2024) looked at a population of 22,827,194 insured minors (just under a 3rd of total US minors in 2019). It found that 85 “trans and gender diverse minors” had some form of surgical gender-affirming care.
