Edited by Will Rose-Moore
In a church and a world that is riven with scandals of abuse and violence, often committed by men, there is an urgent need to delve deeper into the topics of masculinities and trauma that define them. Patriarchal systems simultaneously condition men to perpetrate violence and resist vulnerability, failing to recognise the damage done to themselves as much as to others. Therefore, men’s relationship with traumatic experience is complicated, to say the least. Spanning from colonialism and ecology to eucharistic theology and models of ministry, this book draws together voices from a variety of disciplines and experiences to offer research and reflections on masculinities and trauma in church and theology. If the church begins to take seriously the ways in which masculinities are produced and shaped, and how trauma can be experienced and understood, then there is an opportunity to offer a significant and helpful contribution to the church’s contemporary conversations concerning abuse, safeguarding, and violence, with specific attention to gender.
This book will be published with SCM Press in Summer 2026. All royalties will be donated to Beyond Equality, a UK charity faciliating worskhops to engage men and boys in transforming masculinities and promoting gender equality.
Contributors
Foreword by Helen-Ann Hartley. Chapters by Karen O’Donnell, Katie Cross, Will Rose-Moore, Andrew Graystone, Charlie Bączyk-Bell, David Tombs, Isabelle Hamley, Alexiana Fry, Andrew Boakye, Kendrick Kemp, Benjamin Schweitzer, Tim Judson, Carlton Turner, Anupama Ranawana, Melissa Dickinson, Tim Middleton, Chris Clare Dingwall-Jones, Ian Henderson, Al Barrett, and Simon Sutcliffe. Poetry by Jay Hulme, Aysha Taha, Jarel Robinson-Brown, Georgia Day, Brandon Fletcher-James, Tyrone Davis Jr., Will Rose-Moore, and Ian Henderson. Afterword by Pamela Lightsey.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Helen-Ann Hartley
Part One: Introduction and Approach
- Introduction: Paying Attention to Masculinities and Trauma
Will Rose-Moore - To Be a Man
Jay Hulme - Moving From Feminist Trauma Theologies to Masculinities
Karen O’Donnell, Katie Cross, and Will Rose-Moore - Human Kind
Aysha Taha
Part Two: The Abuse and Traumatisation of Men and Masculinities
- ‘I am your father in God’: Narratives of Fatherhood in Conservative Evangelical Mechanisms of Coercive Control
Andrew Graystone - Ecclesiam
Jarel Robinson-Brown - But how could you do such a thing – and enjoy it? Queering masculinities in a traumatising church
Charlie Bączyk-Bell - Going Under the Yoke: Punitive Stripping and Disgraced Masculinity
David Tombs
Part Three: Masculinities and Trauma Through The Lens of Scripture
- ‘Bring out the men’: repressed trauma and the threat to masculinity in Genesis 19 and Judges 19
Isabelle Hamley - Hurt People Hurting People: Ezekiel, Masculinities, and Perpetrator Trauma
Alexiana Fry - The Mark of Cain
Georgia Day - Top Boy: Honour, Shame and Violence in the Biblical Manosphere
Andrew Boakye
Part Four: How Masculinities and Trauma are Racialised
- Broken Masculinity: Deconstructing the Hegemon Through Race and Disability
Kendrick A. Kemp and Benjamin R. Schweitzer - Traumatising Whiteness: A Gethsemanian Re-Imagining of White Masculinity
Tim Judson - Akeldama
Georgia Day - On Colonial Trauma and White Men’s Christian Mission: Is There an Alternative?
Carlton Turner - Colonial Amnesia
Brandon Fletcher-James - Mission, Silence and Nationalism: A Case study from Sri Lanka
Anupama Ranawana
Part Five: Witnessing and Responding to Masculinities and Trauma
- Trauma and the ecotheological problems of the ‘Manthropocene’
Melissa Dickinson and Timothy A. Middleton - I am suspicious of people who don’t take Beauty seriously.
Tyrone Davis, Jr. - Thinking Gender through Eucharistic Complicity: A Trans Feminist Account of Masculinity and Trauma
Chris Clare Dingwall-Jones - Broken Bodies Breaking Bodies
Will Rose-Moore - Called to Vulnerability: Undoing, Abiding, and Remaining as a Minister
Ian Henderson - A Prayer at the Edge of Undoing
Ian Henderson - Trauma, de/composing masculinities and ensoiled christologies (or, how men might start to face their shit)
Al Barrett and Simon Sutcliffe
Afterword
Pamela R. Lightsey
Editor
The Rev’d Will Rose-Moore is a priest and theologian, currently serving as Assistant Curate at St John the Baptist, Loughton in the Diocese of Chelmsford. He is also studying for a PhD in Theology with Westcott House in the Cambridge Theological Federation and Anglia Ruskin University. Will is the author of Boys Will Be Boys, and Other Myths: Unravelling Biblical Masculinities (SCM Press, 2022).
More details, including how to pre-order the book, will be added to this webpage closer to the time of publication. Be sure to check out Will’s other publications in the meantime.
Will Rose-Moore 