Practicing Hope, Practicing Lamentation: Religious Ethics in a Tragic World

As Christian ethics surveys the ongoing complexity in Gaza, much of the theological reflections come from Western Christian scholars, sometimes in dialogue with Islamic figures, but the Eastern Christian tradition is largely overlooked as an area of ethical discourse. This paper represents the important area of Levantine social ethics in diaspora, specifically the ways in which Arabic and Aramaic speaking communities have liturgized their experiences of genocide and displacement to offer descendant communities a unique social ethic that is non-Western and overtly decolonial. I examine how mass violence has impacted generational identity formation, informed by social science work on suicidality in multigenerational trauma, and then examine discourse on resilience from Eastern Orthodox communities abroad. I argue that the Eastern Orthodox moral tradition has formed language-protective traditions, ritual practices that commemorate experiences of displacement, and other cultural community protective factors which could provide an infrastructure for resiliency after trauma.