Mark, Mutuality, And Mental Health: Encounters With Jesus

Focusing on mutuality and seeking to re-imagine power relations, this work explores the Gospel of Mark by drawing together power-aware biblical scholarship, postcolonial theory, and the insights of readers with poor mental health who have first-hand experience of social structures of exclusion.

Mainwaring explores the societal contexts of those who suffer poor mental health, and in particular the relational dynamics of how identity, agency, and dialogue are negotiated in personal encounters. This work seeks to serve as an experiment, such that interested readers might better understand the dynamics of relational power that pervade encounters with persons with poor mental health.

Features: Foucauldian analysis of the relational dynamics of poor mental health used to re-imagine hegemonic relational dynamics; Close readings of encounters between individual characters to evaluate how mutuality operates in those encounters; Study of mutuality as it has emerged in mental health literature, feminist theologies, and theologies of disability.

The Rev. Dr. Simon Mainwaring is rector of All Saints’ Episcopal Church. Simon is originally from England and was educated at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Birmingham where he earned a PhD in biblical theology. Simon has ministered in schools, hospitals, and parish churches, and is also the author of two books, and a number of journal articles.