My dissertation examines a theology of resilience for Korean diaspora communities who

inherit the past trauma, experience ongoing hate crimes against Asians in the present, and may have difficulty envisioning life in the U.S.. To address the phenomenon of intergenerational trauma in Korean Americans’ lives, I engage with three contemporary Korean American literary works written by second generation Korean American writers. By using trauma framework and a more aesthetic approach to theology, I explore how these literary works hold unspoken suffering, its mysterious transmission to subsequent generations, and the subtle but dynamic relationship between unclaimed past traumatic wounds and lives of the current generation.

To provide a theological response to inherited traumas, this project incorporates psychological literature on resilience into my theological constructive work, to reconstruct alternative theologies of transformation. Through a critical engagement with psychological literature in resilience, I seek to explore how this literature helps theologians rethink the traditional theological understanding of healing, what might be lacking in their concept of resilience, and whether this individual therapeutic term may properly name what it means for living with and beyond the transmitted trauma to Korean diaspora communities. By turning back to the selected contemporary Korean American literary works, this project will offer theological constructions that can help reimagine young Korean Americans’ way of participating in healing the historical trauma and their ways of cultivating capacities for living with the ongoing impact of trauma, drawing on the writers’ expressions of resilience in Korean American life. Through this work, I intend my project to re-theorize theological resilience through the actions of communal witness, grief, and resistance in ways that take seriously the contextual situation of the resurgence of anti-Asian violence.