Book Hub is a conversation with authors on timely themes.

Beyond Job’s Friends: Accompanying Those in the Trauma Pits

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This Month's Book Hub

The afterlife of traumatic experiences and long-term stress lives in our bodies. It impacts nearly every part of congregational life, including how we relate to ourselves, each other, and God. When and how do leaders name this trauma outright? How do trauma and trauma-informed care fit within the Biblical story or call for adaptation of worship and faith formation? How do we coach others out of sympathy into empathy that leads to care and action (compassion) against sources of ongoing trauma? How do we take care of ourselves and our own pain? To varying degrees, everyone has experienced some trauma from the COVID-19 pandemic. How do we walk alongside them now? Let’s talk about it.

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Thursday, June 16th, 2022
FREE Admission

Featured Books

A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance

A Time to Mourn and a Time to Dance

Tony Rodriguez was a compassionate and well-respected trauma therapist who devoted his life to helping survivors thrive until his life was cut short in a tragic accident. Traumatized by the sudden loss of her husband and overwhelmed by the impact of his untimely death on their two sons, Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez was determined to blaze a path toward healing. From the excruciating days immediately following his death to navigating the bewildering labyrinth of young widowhood, to forging a new life for herself and her sons, A Time to Mourn & A Time to Dance chronicles her story with unabashed honesty and deep vulnerability, blended with authentic faith and teeth-clenching determination to do the hard work of healing. Ohman-Rodriguez retraces her own steps out of trauma’s grasp from the depths of despair back to the joy of living. This book is infused with Jennifer’s heartfelt prayers, real-life applications of somatic and spiritual healing practices, and the kind of profound and practical wisdom that only reveals itself in life’s moments of truth.

What You'll Learn

  • Tools for conflict management, storytelling and empathetic listening
  • A better sense of the universality of unhealed traumatic experiences
  • Ways of experiencing poetry and the arts as a way of unpacking racial trauma
  • Tools for recognizing unhealed trauma impacting congregational conflict
  • A highly nuanced approach to traumatic healing
  • Common points in ministry when sensitivity to trauma is crucial
  • Trauma-informed approaches to worship, preaching, teaching, equity work, and pastoral care

Practice Justice

Trauma, in all its forms, can feel like an injustice. That’s because it is. As people who have all experienced trauma in one form or another, it’s safe to imagine that we wanted, needed, or deserved something different – something less traumatic. We may not be able to restore the past, but we can repair the future.

Meet the authors

Jennifer-Ohman-Rodriguez

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez, M.Div., M. Ed.

Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez recently graduated from Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota with a Master of Divinity degree. During the height of the pandemic, she served as Vicar in a sole pastoral presence to the congregation of St. Andrew Lutheran Church (ELCA) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Currently, Ohman-Rodriguez is awaiting her first call in Word and Sacrament ministry in the ELCA. Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez’s first book, A Time to Mourn and a Time to Dance: A Love Story of Grief, Trauma, Healing, and Faith, was released earlier this year and is published by Chalice Press. She also curates Trauma Recovery at Compassionate Christianity. Ohman-Rodriguez’s extensive work in faith formation curricula published by 1517 Media and Westminster John Knox Press is in the resources Spark, Whirl, Frolic, Feasting on the Word, Christ in our Home, Sundays and Seasons, as well as in leader sourcebooks accompanying the work the Dan Erlander. Her magazine articles and essays appear in Gather, The Christian Century, Young Children, Young Children and the Creative Arts, QC Family Focus, The Lutheran, The Lutheran Digest, Zoay, Books Make a Difference, The Living Lutheran, Faith+Lead as well as The Little Lutheran and The Little Christian. Ohman-Rodriguez worked in the early care and education field for twenty years earning a Master of Education degree from the Erikson Institute for Advanced Studies in Child Development in Chicago, Illinois. Before becoming an educator, Ohman-Rodriguez was a professionally trained musician with a Bachelor of Music degree from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.

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