Stephanie Arel – Feminism and Religion

CrossFit, Spirituality, and Trauma: An Introduction by Stephanie Arel with Ashleigh Gibb

We met online. Saram College hosted a theology and trauma workshop that Stephanie taught. Ashleigh asked a question. An immediate connection emerged.

The connection consists of mutual interest and passion around bodies, their strength, their vulnerability; around the spirit, its expressions and its intrinsic materiality; and trauma, what violations to our bodies cause to disrupt and annihilate us. Our interests intersect. Stephanie teaches Scripture and the Human Response to Trauma at Fordham; Ashleigh is a Crossfit Coach and Personal Trainer currently pursuing her PhD. She has nine years of experience working with survivors of trafficking and sexual violence. Together, we recorded a few YouTubes on CrossFit and Spirituality, on Crossfit and Community, and one forthcoming with a topic in the works.

Memorializing Grief and Trauma by Stephanie Arel

On Monday, March 18^th, I joined a webinar developed by Dr. John Seitz and Sonia de Silva Monteiro at Fordham University. The panel included myself, Dr. Layla Karst, Assistant Professor of Theological Studies from Loyola Marymount, and Dr. Alana Harris, Reader in Modern British Social, Cultural and Gender History at King’s College London. All offered valuable insights to the topic: “Memorializing Clergy Sexual Abuse: An Interdisciplinary Conversation about the Ethics, Means, and Meanings of Sex Abuse Memorials.” The panel represented one of a series you can follow here.

My presentation featured some things I learned from researching my last book Bearing Witness: The Wounds of Trauma at Memorial Museums. The text focuses on memorial museums, illuminating methods of memorializing human suffering, suffering that penetrates workers’ personal lives. In fact, people preserving painful memories and histories often labor (physically and emotionally) from a place of personal wounding. From nine sites across the globe, 82 interviews revealed that 35% of the people engaged in memorializing mass trauma in a museum setting are survivors of the event they commemorate; 35% are family members of those who suffered or died; and the remaining signify community members, who are not impacted directly by the event or events commemorated but care deeply about those who were.

Touch, Intimacy, and the Christian Tradition by Stephanie Arel

I’ve been thinking more and more about physical touch, a subject I explore in my first book Affect Theory, Shame, and Christian Formation. The concept of touch – its presence and its frequent absence – beckons me again. In several posts, I will explore aspects of touch to get to my central concern – how good touch indicate, supports, and fosters intimacy, something confounding in human relationality. For this post, I consider the Christian tradition and touch.

In Tactile Engagements in Christian Understanding, Teresa Swan Tuite examines touch in biblical history as one way of “making explicit the ways in which bodies give sense to the theological landscape.” Swan Tuite brings to bear the notion of being known through touch, using as one example the disciple’s recognition of Jesus through touch in the Gospel of John. Caravaggio’s famous painting The Incredulity of St. Thomas depicts the scene which Shelly Rambo details in her blog post on this site.

Get Some Grip! by Stephanie Arel

In my practice working in rehabilitative exercise, addressing minor injuries as well as traumatic ones – from brain injuries to falls, I see a lot of women over 60 who have a history of not training or challenging their upper body. The lack of upper body strength in women is, in some part, a result of culture. The historic role for women molds them to avoid muscles – to look thin, small, or frail in the upper body. A message emerges: “Let the man do it.” These roles are not benign, a fact reflected by changes in cultural views of sex and gender roles/expectations. While hewing to the feminine idea of the past might be easier, there is a price to pay later in life.

Anecdotally, men concern themselves with larger pecs, big biceps, and successful arm wrestling. Incidentally, when they can no longer do what they did as young men, some men give up doing much of anything. In my experience, women usually don’t surrender to age, but they traditionally resist both the look of a strong upper body and the labor necessary to achieve such strength. I have one client who feels afraid every time she has a weight over 10 pounds in her hands. Furthermore, women often defer to men: observe the next time you travel who lifts luggage in an airplane or brings baggage to the car. Life gets easier when someone else can grab the bags…but this ultimately makes later life harder – strength in the upper body is critical to the ability to break a fall, recover from injuries, and longevity.

Honoring the Self by Stephanie Arel

365 days inhabit a year. Maximizing each day entails creating habits. Looking toward this new year, I’ve been thinking about habits that might facilitate a composure apparent in women I admire (Julia Kristeva, Ann Ulanov to name two): I’ll name this self-command as a calm, stalwart comfort with themselves. It’s a self-command I would like to possess, and so I am creating a list of 365 things: simple and some not so simple daily practices held with the intention to honor the self.

What does “Honor yourself (or your self)” mean, though? Sites all over the internet chime in. “Respect, admire, appreciate yourself.” “Redefine the word selfish.” And “Love yourself.” One site focuses on creating practices where honor manifests as “respect and integrity – acting in accordance with your values and holding yourself in high esteem.” In making my list, I realized the necessity to categorize the actions in terms of what they produce. What actions foster a calm, stalwart comfort?

Identifying the Drama Triangle in Fiction and Reality by Stephanie Arel

Are you planning to gather with family or friends to celebrate during the holiday season? For many, this idea elicits joy, but for others, it evokes tension, dread. Some may even think, “Ugh, I don’t want to deal with the drama.” The reaction is real. Elucidating a psychological concept related to such dread sheds light on this “drama” and may help you manage tense and potentially provocative situations over the holidays.

Stephen Karpman developed the concept of the drama triangle in his 1968 essay, Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis. He looked at the stories that cultures tell, considering how these stories instill images, roles, and demeanors in the social imagination, which then manifest in individual and group behavior. The narrated plot lines work on the unconscious to provide attractive stereotypes: the helpless (as a human) mermaid Ariel makes a deal with a Sea Witch for legs; she becomes human but loses her voice in exchange – a voice restored due to the true love of a prince. Cinderella, the stepdaughter working amidst the ashes for the evil stepmother, wishes for more, and viewers watch as a prince eventually arrives. Stereotypical Barbie faces an existential crisis; she, like Ariel, finds power in human form, and corrects the wrongs of patriarchal society against both doll and owner. Every drama presents a triangle.

Fierce Friendship and the Holidays by Stephanie Arel

It is the weekend before Thanksgiving, in the ominous year of 2020. The CDC urges people not to gather with others outside of the household on Thursday. COVID infections rise exponentially. Schools are closing, and in the much of the country, winter is foreboding.

If you live in a cold climate, Thanksgiving dinner outdoors is hardly an option. For, Chanukah, Christmas, and New Year’s, we will likely endure the same conditions. I have tried to center myself, mediate, do things to calm my nervous system, using some of my personal tools for stimulating the vagus nerve so as to not feel toxic. I think that is what the cortisol in my body is telling me: slow down, gather, go inward. But I also sense a missingness – a loneliness – alongside a desire to reach out, call people, and connect. (See the effects and remedies for social isolation here.) Away from people, traditions, anticipation of my favorite time of year, I brace for a deeper sense of loss. Continue reading “Fierce Friendship and the Holidays by Stephanie Arel”

The Practice of Bearing Witness by Stephanie Arel

She looked away and stared out the window, trying to hold back the tears in her eyes. “The tents,” she said and shook her head looking down at the ground. The tears were coming, but softly. I asked her what the tents represent. She shrugged her shoulders and said into the camera phone: “The bodies I guess. They don’t have enough room for the bodies.”

In this time of the coronavirus, as in Italy and Spain, New York City has room neither in the hospitals nor the morgue for the bodies that are dying. Up from 25 a week, to 24 a day, bodies are being buried on Hart Island, or City Cemetery, where the unclaimed and unidentified have been interred for decades. Others are waiting in refrigerated trucks for friends and family members to collect them. This New Yorker along with thousands of others have seen the stark reality, one that left even Trump sick at heart.

We are witnessing a global pandemic. Evidence of the ravages of the coronavirus lies all around us. The response to the virus has made physiological, economic, and psychological impacts on our lives. We have changed our working styles, dealt with lowered income, or lost our jobs. Staying secluded at home, we have taken on new roles for which we were not prepared; many of us have become sick, and some have died. We are together witnessing a major world disaster.

What does it mean to be a witness? What will it mean to carry that witnessing forward to future generations to mark this historic event so that when something like it happens again, future generations will have the tools they need to respond more quickly, adapt more easily, recover more rapidly? For this generation, just as those who researched and learned from the Spanish Flu, we bear witness. Continue reading “The Practice of Bearing Witness by Stephanie Arel”

Exploring Muslimness in the Aftermath of September 11, 2001 by Stephanie Arel

In my last post, I addressed the deeply personal accounts of Haroon Moghul’s self- and religious exploration in his memoir How to be a Muslim: An American Story. This post will broaden that reading to consider an October 2017 interview with Moghul at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in New York City.

The interview echoes themes relevant to current global crises which implicate religion including how religious rhetoric circulates to support extremist violence and Islamophobia. Exploring how the events of 9/11 intertwine with such crises adds depth to understanding Moghul’s individual experience.

Continue reading “Exploring Muslimness in the Aftermath of September 11, 2001 by Stephanie Arel”

Psychology and Religion Collide in the Journey of an American Muslim by Stephanie Arel

After the horrific events of September 11, 2001, Haroon Moghul, the undergraduate leader at New York University’s Islamic Center, was called upon to be a representative voice for Muslims in America even as he negotiated his own relationship with Islam. He recounts his religious journey, alongside personal encounters with suicide and bipolar disorder, in his recently published memoir: How to be a Muslim: An American Story. Recognized by Ausuma Zehanat Khan in The Washington Post as “an extraordinary gift,” the memoir offers, what Khan calls, “an authentic portrait of a vastly misunderstood American community.”

The vulnerability and honesty exemplified in Moghul’s writing actualizes a pathway for understanding his experience of Muslim life in the United States post 9/11. His personal perspective and sensitivity foster an empathic response. Emma Green of The Atlantic recognizes his focus on a more intimate encounter with religion, pinpointing how Moghul’s narrative represents “writing about Islam that’s not about terrorism or war.” Continue reading “Psychology and Religion Collide in the Journey of an American Muslim by Stephanie Arel”