Join together online with the global community in prayer for peace in Ukraine. Wednesdays at 12 p.m. EST (UTC -5)

Depression as a Wilderness Experience: Theological resources for depression in the wake of trauma

ON-DEMAND WEBINAR
Depression as a Wilderness Experience: Theological resources for depression in the wake of trauma
with Jessica Coblentz, PhD

In the wake of traumatic events, many survivors experience psychological distress, including conditions like depression. These traumas and their psychological aftermath frequently engender disorientation and difficult questions: What is happening? Why is this happening? And what is one to do amid such pain? Depression sufferers and those who accompany them sometimes turn to faith communities for answers, and though some find solace in the theological and practical responses they receive, many Christians are left searching. Coblentz’s book, Dust in the Blood: A Theology of Life with Depression (Liturgical Press), adds to the Christian theological resources available to depression sufferers and those who accompany them. This lecture will introduce one such resource—an understanding of depression as a wilderness experience—and explore its implications for Christian interpretations of and responses to life with depression. (Art: Gesture of Grace by Jan Richardson)

Jessica Coblentz, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. Her teaching and research focus on Catholic systematic theology, feminist theologies, and mental health in theological perspective. She is the author of Dust in the Blood: A Theology of Life with Depression (Liturgical), and the coeditor of The Human in a Dehumanizing World: Reexamining Theological Anthropology and Its Implications (Orbis). In addition to her contributions to numerous academic journals and essay collections, her writing has been featured in the National Catholic Reporter, U.S. Catholic, America, and Give Us This Day.

Registration

Name
Email
May we send you occasional emails to update you on upcomng webinars and other news from the Margaret Brennan Institute?

Stay in Touch

Sign up for more information about the Margaret Brennan Institute, including upcoming webinars.

Prayer for me, then, has been an entering into my own heart and experience and finding its meaning in the experience of Jesus and of his Mother who is the perfect Christian and faith-filled believer.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in New Catholic World (Jan/Feb 1977, p. 21)

Spirituality is what our faith looks like in everyday life. Spirituality is about getting to the bottom of our restlessness. It is here that God comes. It is here where God is.

Margaret Brennan, IHM (Presentation at the Summer Pastoral Theological Institute at St. John Center for Youth and Family in Plymouth, Mich., on Aug. 12, 1999)

To resist evil and violence both within and outside us is to acknowledge ourselves as purposeful agents of salvation, and of responsibility, to ourselves and others, capable of moral discernment, courage, creativity and solidarity.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in What Was There For Me Once: A Memoir (2009, p. 79)

You never come to the bottom, do you? How do you come to the bottom of coming to know God? God is so big that you just come to know different things about God all the time. As you learn more about the world you learn more about God.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in a voice recording on September 15, 2015

Prayer is … the challenge to find Jesus, to respond to him, to rejoice in his goodness, and mercy, and tender love … in the encounters of every day and in the challenging, often ambiguous signs of our times.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in New Catholic World (Jan/Feb 1977, p. 21)

Spirituality is the capacity to live deeply in the concrete, creative order of things even as we stretch through and beyond them.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in Compass: A Jesuit Journal (Sept/Oct 1994, p. 19)

When both our light and our darkness are integrated then our inner and outer lives are integrated. Losing ourselves and then finding ourselves again is the pattern of our journey through life.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, at St. Paul’s Retreat Center (May 11, 2009)

The experience of God and ways of knowing the holy are the same as our mode of knowing all other things. And that mode is sensuality.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in Compass: A Jesuit Journal (Sept/Oct 1994, p. 18)

I grew into a great love of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ and of the liturgy, through which the life of the Church is most deeply expressed.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in What Was There For Me Once: A Memoir (2009, p. 45)

Support the Margaret Brennan Institute

Donate Now