Jeremiah

Whether dealing with collective catastrophe or intimate trauma, recovering from emotional and physical hurt is hard. kathleen o'connor shows that although jeremiah's emotionally wrought language can aggravate readersmemories of pain, it also documents the ways an ancient community-and the prophet personally-sought to restore their collapsed social world. both prophet and book provide a traumatized community language to articulate disaster; move self-understanding from delusional security to identity as survivors; constitute individuals as responsible moral agents; portray god as equally afflicted by disaster; and invite a reconstruction of reality. kathleen m. o'connor is william marcellus mcpheeters professor of old testament at columbia theological seminary. she is the author of lamentations and the tears of the world (2002) and commentaries on lamentations and jeremiah, and coeditor of troubling jeremiah (1999).