Anamnesis as a Source of Love

Abstract

This chapter explores anamnesis—expansive memory across generations—as a way to weave life experiences into a theology of love adequate to embracing tragedy, ambiguity, and moral failure while supporting human flourishing and the struggle for justice. In exploring a peripatetic childhood affected by war and dislocation that led the author to a life of activism, she shows how her theological critiques of atonement theology were informed by work with youth carrying trauma, especially as postmemory so that their parents’ trauma overruns their lives. She argues that atonement theologies inflict a collective postmemory of trauma in Western Christianity that transmits pain across generations and sanctifies punishment and suffering as love. In defining love as mutuality and human flourishing, she discusses how the new term “moral injury” offers embodied knowledge of suffering and trauma and points beyond atonement theology to recovery through the collective work of love, grounded in mutuality and justice for the sake of human flourishing and hope.