This research illuminates the spirituality of the 7th-century monastic site known as Skellig Michael. Very few scholarly works have been published about the island so this research utilizes analogous sources to contextualize and make inferences about the settlement spirituality.

Biblical narrative, an Irish sensibility to nature, and an innate sense of belonging and kinship resulted in a nuanced spirituality for the monastics on Skellig. This research historically contextualizes the settlement, critically analyses the archaeology via a post-processual methodology, explores the concept of pilgrimage or peregrinatio, and applies the insights to writings of analogous peregrini.

This is a forthcoming publication with Pickwick, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishing.

Child sexual abuse in the form of incest is a severe trauma that has long-lasting impacts on one’s psychological, physical, and spiritual well-being. This form of bodily violation typically occurs within dysfunctional family systems, thus disrupting the formation of identity and self-image. As a result, faith development and God’s image are also disrupted. Biblical teaching posits that humanity is made in God’s image. While this has been understood in a variety of ways throughout history, it is primarily through the body that one experiences this truth. It is through the body that one encounters God and lives into the full potential of the imago Dei. For the sexually abused child whose body is a site of violation and oppression, deicide, or the death of how one comes to know God, ensues. Despite this, the body is still revelatory of God and is a site of religious truth. The death, descent, and resurrection of Jesus are brought into dialogue with the experience of incest and offer a theological framework for understanding such experiences. On Good Friday the many deaths that Jesus encounters are paralleled with the loss of safety, innocence, and body that incest victims experience. Next, Holy Saturday is examined as a space of liminality and mystery, indicative of the journey through a chasm of darkness. Ultimately Jesus, like the incest survivors, enters into a new life with old wounds. This work examines the experience of learning to live in a body that both knows death and is made in God’s image.