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Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Cultivating Ideas. My name is Sean Watkins, and I serve as Associate Dean of Lifelong Learning here at Austin Seminary. Cultivating Ideas is our monthly webinar series where we bring you the best and brightest of our faculty, their scholarship, the ideas that they are working on, and the ways in which it can be applicable to you in your context and the real world.

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We are really excited today to have the Reverend Dr. Gregory Cuellar joining us. The Reverend Dr. Greyary Cuyar is the Ruth A.

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Campbell Chair of Biblical Studies here at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary as of this year. So very excited for him in being installed in that chair. Joining the faculty in 2012, Dr. Cuyar is both a professor and lover of the Old Testament and is interested in alternative ways of reading the biblical texts, particularly with themes of liberation, US-Mexico borderlands, post-colonial theory, and migration studies.

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Today, he will speak on the topic of post-colonial trauma in the Book of Lamentations. I'm very excited to have him share with us. Of course, as always, if you've got questions throughout the course of his lecture, be sure to drop those in the chat. We'll have a Q&A time at the conclusion of his lecture, and we'd love to be able to dialogue and discuss with you.

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With that being said, Dr. Coyard, welcome back to Cultivating Ideas, and by all means, take it away. Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to be back with you, and I'm very excited to

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share with you this research. And I'll be reading from a manuscript just to help my thoughts, better organize my thoughts. This is a part of a larger project, a research project that I'll actually be engaged in during my sabbatical. I was also very fortunate to receive a research grant from Louisville Institute for the 2025.

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So very grateful to have the funding and sabbatical and the opportunity to be able to engage in this research. That really goes back to my teaching Lamentations back in 2014. And I've offered Lamentations as a course for several years.

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And this is a book that has attracted my inner spirit. It's a book that does not shy away from hard topics, issues of power and violence, and sometimes quite grotesque and vivid images of violence that we find in Lamentations. That makes it a very timely book for us to study today.

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And so I'm excited about this conversation and I do look forward to our question and answer session. because that helps me in my research. Teaching at a seminary in the Texas-Mexico borderlands, I have discovered that the traumas asylum seekers and migrants endure are more nuanced than simply individual, private, traumatic experiences. And this would be a category

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that would fall under the category of post-traumatic stress disorder. And what I've discovered just from my own interactions with asylum seekers and migrants in the Texas borderlands is that there's something different beyond just what that category seeks to diagnose. In 2014, Texas encountered an influx of unaccompanied children and single-parent families migrating from Central America.

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Circulating in the local news were horrific and disturbing images of asylum-seeking children detained in state-sanctioned animal-like cages. With children of my own, my wife and I were compelled to action and hence started an advocacy-driven ministry of welcome called Arte de la Grimas, Refugee Artwork Project. Here we sit with asylum-seeking children at faith-based respite centers at the Texas border and engage in art play with them. Among the dominant themes in their artwork are stories of their migrant journeys and the homes they had to leave behind.

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As a biblical scholar who studies migration in the Hebrew Bible, Their drawings have attuned my understanding to the visceral nature of the Judean exilic experience. This was first noticeable in my Lamentations exegesis course, where I found myself dissatisfied with the banal interpretations of imperial violence and exile in the commentary literature. And yet, when I turned to the artwork of children, asylum seekers, their stories of trauma

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prompted a more empathic reading of the traumatic experiences poetically expressed in Lamentations. In contrast to scholarly commentaries, the human suffering captured in Lamentations did not generate diagnostic doubt or suspicion, but rather a reverence for what I could see as the book's declared truth. Indeed, drawing on the lived experiences of asylum seekers, migrants, and refugees is now an essential feature of my teachings on exile and migration in the Hebrew Bible. Their inclusion not only enriches class discussions, but also enables seminary students to engage more critically with the specificities of imperial violence and the unique forms of trauma it produces.

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So this project, with this project, I aim to cement the interpretive insights introduced in my Lamentations course by publishing this book. This is part of a book project that delves into the post-colonial traumas woven into the poetry of Lamentations. A core question this project seeks to explore is the following. How can modern experiences of imperial violence inform a deeper understanding of the empire, trauma, nexus in Lamentations, while also help to reveal unseen strategies of trauma, care for contemporary readers?

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I approach this question with the ethical conviction that the Book of Lamentations longs to be seen and heard as a post-conquest collection of trauma poetry. Furthermore, the experiences of contemporary victims of empire-building violence can move Western readers of Lamentations from suspicion to an empathic embrace of the book's declared truth. This involves listening with the understanding that the poets of Lamentations affirm the stubborn will not to forget, not to allow the memory of violence and the accompanying infinite loss to be swept away.

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More than simply filling a gap in the scholarly literature, this project has in view a relevant book resource on trauma that clergy, chaplains, and other religious leaders can use in caring for today's traumatized victims of empire-building violence. In other words, by understanding the profundity and specificity of the traumas expressed in Lamentations, this underutilized biblical book in the North American church can provide a valuable resource for ministering to what Roberto Beneduce calls a chronic atmosphere of uncertainty and violence in which many are forced to live. As a scholar and activist and clergyman,

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I have devoted my professional life to caring for migrant communities traumatized by the empire-building forces that govern the global economy and Western political systems. Theorizing on the unique traumas expressed in Lamentations is rooted in my trauma-informed scholarly praxis in the academy and the world. From welcoming asylum-seeking families at the Texas border to researching the carceral violence in immigration detention facilities, to numerous publications on lamentations, I come to this project brimming with original ideas, second season insights, international dialogue partners, and an activist drive for justice in a world longing for faith-based strategies of healing care.

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A major objective of my research for this project is to assemble A post-colonial trauma-informed hermeneutic for interpreting lamentations. The logic of my research itinerary is informed by two essential arguments made in post-colonial theory. Empire equals violence and hence produces a unique repertoire of traumas that are under-diagnosed in Western epistemologies, Western knowledge production.

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So my research falls under 3 post-colonial trauma-laden contexts. I'm drawing on borderlands, which is where we are situated currently as a seminary, genocide, and slavery. So these are three domains that I am drawing from. as a way to assemble a post-colonial trauma-informed hermeneutic.

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We're reading Lamentations. Now, you could see in Lamentations from the beginning to the end, it is a non-- it's ongoing series of violent scenes, scenes of food scarcity, scenes that involve rape, exile, the death of children, the imprisonment of captured warriors. There's this constant series of scenes of violence.

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And the book really centers around two images involving tears, the ongoing tears and sorrow that the poets express for what they had experienced with the fall of Jerusalem to the Neo-Babylonian Empire. And so it's not until you get to the third chapter that there is just a moment of reprieve, of refuge, where we hear that I think often it's an encouraging verse, uses an encouraging verse that God's mercies are new every morning.

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But that verse is really surrounded by just ongoing, non-stop series of violent scenes to express what was lost and the pain that was felt. And so to understand the uniqueness of the trauma expressed in the poetry of Lamentations, it's my sort of intuition that the trauma that we find experienced in the borderlands by migrants, the trauma that indigenous populations, even the Jewish community, many, many other populations throughout human history facing mass death or genocide, that also becomes a ripe domain for understanding the unique trauma that is expressed in Lamentations. And then slavery, slavery in the U.S., and how that also, when we hear from emancipated slaves and the testimonials of

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emancipated slaves, that we also capture a unique nuance to pain and trauma that I think is very present in the book of Lamentations. So these are some of the initial ideas that I want to put forward to you as we, hopefully we can engage in some some conversation. The chapters that I have for this book have the following titles.

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Lamentations chapter 1, Weaponizing Exile on Confiscated Bodies. Lamentations 2, The Spectacle of Liquidated Bodies. And Lamentations 3, Carceral Torture, of a hunted body.

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You could see there in chapter 3, where it refers to the first person singular, and that person being a warrior who is being hunted and then incarcerated. And so learning more about that carceral torture in Lamentations 3, and then Lamentations 4, producing homicidal hunger in conquered bodies. the way that hunger is described. It's a weaponized, right, by the empire to subject the conquered people.

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And then Lamentations 5, witnessing atrocities as inferiorized bodies, bodies that are seen without value, right? And that's an essential ideology of empire building is to cast the target for conquest as inferior are less than. And so this is what we find in chapter five of Lamentations, witnessing the atrocities as inferiorized bodies.

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And so this is sort of the layout. I'm started the initial research and hopefully we'll get deeper into it as I go into my sabbatical. But I do look forward to conversations, questions, and just dialogue with you.

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Wonderful. Thank you so much, Dr. Coyar. Greatly, greatly, greatly appreciate that.

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And looking forward to, hopefully, it will be a riveting discussion with the folks that are here and participating with us. Again, if you've got questions from what Dr. Coyar has shared so far, Feel free to be able to drop those in the chat.

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If you would like to ask your question directly, by all means, you can come off of a mute and ask that question. We are recording, so we want to make sure we get you both asking the question and engaging with Dr. Cuellar. I'll give a few moments for folks to be able to kind of gather their thoughts.

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I always have questions. Dr. Cuellar, thank you again for a wonderful presentation. My first one really is in the preliminaries.

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I think there's always the discussion around content and context, right? There's the information that we have, but the theology that we read about and gather, but it's contextualized, right? It has to be lived out. And so you talked at the beginning there of this notion or these themes of borderlands, of genocide and slavery.

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Obviously, at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, we are a borderland seminary, and the necessity of thinking about U.S.-Mexico relations as a borderland institution Talk to us about the necessity of having a borderland mindset or a borderlands framework as we're approaching these things. It would be very easy for us to not use that nomenclature as we engage in different topics. Talk to us about the value of making sure that borderlands remains a central theme for us as we engage in this work, both from limitations and then also as Christians navigating this context.

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That's good. Thank you for that question. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldua's writings, borderlands are acute trauma sites of empire, for they represent both the triumphs and wounds of the imperial homeland. So in assembling my hermeneutic for lamentations, I will research border trauma in the US, the UK, and

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European borderlands. In the US, my research focuses on state-sanctioned violence and it's ensuing traumas on the Texas-Mexico border. I start with the 1918 Borvenir massacre that stands out as a content-rich event for studying border trauma at the intersection of empire-building violence. So I'm in communication with the surviving family of one of the surviving youth that was there in 1918 who actually survived that massacre.

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This is a massacre that just recently received a historic marker where it was actually done, where Texas Rangers came in and without due process, marched all of the able-bodied men into a field and shot them in cold blood. And so there's a just testimonial from this survivor about that event and the traumas that event not only caused him, but also his family and his grandchildren. that they still are living out those traumas that happened in 1918.

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So the Port Vanir massacre. And there's also the healing that we see with the Uvalde murals. If you remember, these murals honor the 21 people killed in the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. And so that is another key example of not just

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the violence, being victims of violence, state-sanctioned violence, but also the collective response, right, the lament that is part of the healing and care to those who are suffering from this unique form of trauma, where power, violence, the intersections of race, the intersection of their sense of class and how they see the world, all of these are part of how they are expressing their pain. And so these are key sites for me, and I think that we're not unique in this phenomenon, these realities where we have people who are suffering generationally from empire violence, empire-building violence.

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In Europe, many of the migrants and refugees and asylum seekers who have died in the Mediterranean are coming from former colonies, former colonies of the European nations, former colonies of the UK. And so they are returning back to the empire in search of a better life. And the traumas that they experience in crossing the Mediterranean and what is felt. So that also is a very key sight.

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And how do these borderlands speak to each other? That we're not isolated in what we're seeing and what we're experiencing. It belongs to a broader condition and systemic issues that people are facing in other parts of the world.

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So it's bringing all of those borderlands into conversation and generating a richer understanding of how empire is not a one-time event, but it leads to ripple effects, this ongoing condition of pain and sorrow that we could see present in the book of Lamentations, right? We know that the book of Lamentations wasn't an immediate response right after the conquest of Jerusalem. It took time.

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It took time. And it would be part of what Dominique LaCapra writes about in his theory of trauma. The Lamentations is much the response of structural trauma. But structural trauma doesn't negate the historical trauma.

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And that's the lived event that actually happened. A city was destroyed. People lost their lives. That it was, people were exiled.

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That there's the visceral, the material trauma that was very much present, but that Lamentations is more of a structural response, right? Where they're asking, not only mapping the violence, but they're also asking moral questions. Who did this?

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Why did this happen? And of course, there's a theological tradition in the Hebrew Bible that tries to offer a response to that structural trauma. In many ways, it's a almost works as a coping mechanism to place God as the cause for the imperial building violence.

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And so it's understanding the nuances of those various domains of hurt and pain and how they are coming out. And I think that we hear from people who have hurt in this kind of way, where there's this nexus of empire building and being the target of sort of being casted as subhuman, that it spawns something very unique. And Lamentation seems to capture that.

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Probably is the best explanation I think I've ever heard of anybody talking about Borderlands before. That was outstanding. Thank you, Dr. Coyer.

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I greatly appreciate that. I love those notions of acute trauma as sites of empire and naming the historical realities. I think especially to go back to a forgotten trauma for some people, but to have survivors from a trauma from 1918 and to also wear that to the Uvalde school shooting in 2022, that for those of us in Texas, anytime there's a shooting or a school shooting or children are harmed, we feel it viscerally, but something that's really about 3 hours outside of Austin.

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So we definitely viscerally felt that. So thank you for naming that reality. And again, using that, I think, to illustrate the definitions and the implications of a borderland, both institution, but then also a borderland lifestyle.

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Thank you for that immensely. Are there other questions for Dr. Koyar that we've got today? I know we've got some folks that are here and hopping in and out, want to be able to open the floor up if we've got questions for him at this time.

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I have a question. Go for it, Laura. So I'm excited about this work, Dr. Koyar.

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And I definitely can see it in terms of where your hermeneutical lens is going. And I'm just struggling with thinking about how this could be preached without people getting stuck in the violence. And of course, it's, as you said, in Lamentations, there's all these successive descriptions of continual violence and why does God allow it? And that's where I think preachers might hesitate.

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And as a still first year seminarian, struggling with how do you present that in a sermon and bring everybody back to the God that is loving? Yeah. You know, the place where many preachers tend to go with the book of Lamentations.

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Like I said, it's right there in the middle part of chapter three. And I find that to be a useful move. I think it's something that the lectionary tries to take advantage of that part of Lamentations. So that would be, I think, a starting point

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your tradition could support, but it would also be, I think, crucial, or it could lead to a misrepresentation of the book if there's not the setting up of that, those texts of hope and reminding they're not alone, that God loves them, that God's mercy is available to them in the midst of their violence and their trauma. So it's a fine balance to be able to push your congregation to hear what the scripture is wanting to teach us and also wanting us not to forget, but also knowing that not everything that is in the book of Lamentations dwells on that violence at the detriment of that message of hope. So it's both present and there.

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It's just how you create that balance and really how much of the two is your congregation equipped to receive. There may be some who are come out of abuse and come out of emotional distress and find themselves not in a position to be able to learn about that. So it may not be an adequate book.

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So there may be seasons where it could be useful for a congregation. So timing, the audience, the balance that you take, I think it shows you, shows that you're handling the text. with integrity, right? That you're not just isolating one topic, but you're showing it, you see, you're putting it within the broader context.

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So it's a delicate process, and I know that it's not an easy topic to study for, I mean, we do want to get to the hope, and we do want to be able to be at a place of healing care. But in many ways, there's also this unique healing dynamic that expressing what has happened to you, that does for you, that does to help heal trauma. Working with

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little kids who have crossed the border and they draw their journeys, the process of going through those drawings and acknowledging God being present in their journey, you could see how they're processing it in a different way. So poetry is an art form and lamen is an art form. So there's something very powerful and life-giving with the way in which the violence is described, right?

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So it's using art, it's using poetry. And so though those scenes are graphic, it's contained within an art form in order to encourage a deep sense of lament. And that's something that we've, in many ways, lost in our society. the ability to lament, to be able to, the rituals, the praxis of lamentation is in many ways lost in our society where we much rather prefer to move into those realms that provide us with happiness.

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And lamentation is really causing, calling us to to draw on the traditions of lament. You know, whether it be, um, Irish hymns, you know, Irish folk hymns have this kind of melancholic lament. Some country music, blues is a powerful-- is a powerful musical genre that allows for a community to...

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seeing and to channel this pain in a very poetic and artistic way. So there's something that could be healing, though the content may be violent on the surface. The way it's being conveyed has something very intrinsically healing and powerful to it. So you may need to be creative with your sermon.

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Could you present the violence in an artistic way, much like what Lamentations is doing? Could be that you could offer a series of paintings as a way to preach about that violence. And that would connect, I think, very powerfully with how Lamentations conveys its message. Thank you, Professor.

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It's outstanding, thank you, Dr. Cuero. Absolutely, that was wonderful. Yeah, Laura, everything that I said, I think definitely in setting the hymns, especially the spirituals from different cultures, even the blues and country music, that's outstanding.

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He also referenced, dictated and really demonstrated some tenets that's in a book called The Four Pages of the Sermon, which is an excellent book. It talks about there's trouble in the world, there's trouble in the text, there's hope in the world, there's hope in the text. Doctor Hoyar is spot on it's a dance, and so you'll have to look at the context for those things, but that's just another resource in addition to the resources that Doctor Hoyar offered, so outstanding there. Doctor Hoyar.

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We've got another question for you. This one's from Carlos Baladez. He puts in the chat, what is the correlation between the Empire as abuser and those it abuses to a codependency relationship? And I'll say that again for you.

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What is the correlation between the Empire as abuser and those it abuses to a codependency relationship? Yeah, you're. Your question, I think it draws attention to the multi-layered relationship that this is that's created from the violence of colonization, imperial conquest, the sort of subject, the process of subjugating a population by use of force. and drawing on a supporting ideology that legitimates that violence.

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This is a question that points to the work of Frantz Fanon. If you read Frantz Fanon's work, Wretched of the Earth, he is attempting to catalog these nuances to how the colonized population respond to the empire as, you know, in different modes. At times, there seems to be acquiescing to the empire as a way to survive and to manage in this new social order, which

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it leads to the strategy of divide and conquer, right, where you're forced to turn on your own as a way to acquire some access to advantage or moderate forms of power within the imperial system. So this is a Unfortunately, just the complexity and the toxicity of this structure of empire and as a force of a social force that creates different identities for the colonized. Some who choose to acquiesce and to deny themselves, deny their own

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sense of identity and ancestry even to where you seek to become like, you know, the sort of the ideal figure within the empire. You've been told that you are subhuman, that your culture and your history is valueless. So is a way to acquire value.

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You deny that part of your identity and seek to try and meet up to the measurement of what is ideal within the imperial structure. So it's a psychosis, sort of part of the psychic trauma that colonized are faced with. Dealing with their own inferiority, what they've been told. Their subjugation stems on the fact that

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they are seen as subhuman, that their humanity is less than theirs. And so that creates an emotional and mental condition that Frantz Fanon's work seeks to address. And I would also add Achile Mbembe's work on necropolitics also is wanting to diagnose more specifically these different dynamics that happen to colonize people, where you are sometimes having to acquiesce to what the empire is saying about you, and then at other points, revolt and resist.

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And I think Lamentations is the latter. It's a book that resists empire, the fact that it attributes imperial violence to their God is a form of resistance, right? It's, I'm not going to allow for your ideology to define what happened to me.

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I'm going to assign it to God. So there's a very unique, provocative, subversive move that theology proposes to the colonized mind. So these are dynamics I would encourage you to follow up on Frantz Fanon's work, especially his last chapter of Wretched of the Earth, where he talks about the colonized mind.

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Frantz Fanon, yes, absolutely. Just an amazing, necessary body of work. Absolutely wonderful. Any other questions for Dr.

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Cuellar here? I've got one. Oh, Peter, go for it, please, by all means. Yeah.

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Well, we talked about the powerful form of lament, poetic lament to express the violence. But what about the acrostic nature of the poetry? What's the relationship there?

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I mean, very orderly, rational, A, B, C, D. Is there a relation there? Yes, it's a good question. That acrostic, it is, it falls out of use in chapter 5.

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but it does dictate the organization of the scenes of violence for chapters 1 to 4. And the way that I've argued about the acrostic is that they function as object things because some of the letters are switched. They don't follow strictly the acrostic that you would find in Psalm, like Psalms 119, which follows the acrostic. throughout, but there are moments in the acrostic where the poet intentionally switches letters.

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So there is something else going on. There's a use of that literary device and that literary tradition of acrostic, but something also else is going on. There's a new way of presenting it. My sense is that each scene

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that those letters open up in chapters one to four. So they're opening up scenes with one word that begins with Aleph Bet Gimel Daleche. And that one word emerges as a object. So it becomes a word object by being part of this organizational scheme of acrostic.

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And so to have it as an object, it actually provides a sense of control for the traumatized poet. Functions much like collections do, I think, in the modern world, when people lose a loved one, how turning to collections, whether it be collecting coffee cups or whether it be collecting baseball cards.

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We create these series. So there's something, there's a connection that I'm seeing between collecting of these word objects and grieving loss in the contemporary world and how we as humans turn to trying to create order from what appears to be disorder with the loss of someone, our orientation, we're in a sort of in a disorientation. So objects can be utilized as a coping mechanism to regain some form of control over our situation.

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So that to have all of your objects lined up in the series and to be able to see those objects daily and add to them within that order scheme, there's a therapy that praxis provides for us as humans. And I think that's present in these acrostics. It's functioning as a therapeutic strategy to be able to order these chaotic scenes

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right? These scenes that have created such disorientation, not to the extent to where they don't have some sense of agency, right? They're still remembering. They're not completely paralyzed.

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They aspire not to be forgotten, but that they're, so they're providing order to this chaos, right? And that is, therapeutic in many ways. So the acrostic is a therapeutic device.

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Thank you so much. That's beautiful. Yeah. That's outstanding.

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Thank you, Dr. Coyer, immensely. Most Austin Seminary knows I lost my mother last month. And so that notion of chaos and feeling like everything is disordered and the need to be able to have those collections, as you mentioned, have been seminal.

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And so that's an excellent, excellent, excellent point. I overstand, as I tell most of my students and colleagues. So thank you very much for that. Our time is getting ready to draw to a close.

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Any other questions for Dr. Cuellar here as we get ready to wrap up? I do want to circle back, and it's kind of related to what Laura was asking earlier. I am a fan of the Old Testament as well.

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And as we were talking to a biblical scholar and the chair of biblical studies here at Austin Seminary, How and when did Lamentations come alive for you in such a way that you have tied it to borderlands, again, these notions of genocide and slavery? And you've talked a lot about both weaponizing exile, liquid bodies, tortured bodies, that homicidal hunger, inferior bodies. You have an embodiment that's taking place here as you look at Lamentations.

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How did the text come alive for you in such a way that you were studying it in your own scholarship, but some type of way, it immediately began to take root in today's lived context and the issues that we see happening both nationally and globally. How did that wedding of old scripture and new context come alive for you? Well, you know, the constant just onslaught

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of violent scenes is suffocating. And it makes one feel like you're drowning. But it's a controlled drowning, right? Because it's all within these acrostics.

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And feeling that drowning, when you are able to read it in the original text and see the nuances that are sometimes missed in the English translations, you are quickly awakened to a text that is teaching us to not just acknowledge that power can harm you, but that this is how it happens. And this is why it happens.

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And these are the details about what it can do to you. And I think that is something very rich about this book is that it's, that's wisdom, right? To give you that kind of instinct and awareness, not just to have a general sense of what power can do, but specifically what it can do to you on your body.

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I think that's very empowering. It's an empowering form of wisdom that we are beginning to see erode in our current moment where There is these specific acts of violence that are happening across our society. I mean, we may get glimpses of them, but we are, you know, it's sort of inured into the specificity with the constant busyness and the belief that things are going to just work themselves out.

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But there's really the pedagogical I think modeling that Lamentations calls us into is to hear with specificity, understand with specificity what has happened to you, what has, how is this power actually working on your body? And that I think is such a, was what has inspired me. It sort of just became the

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the catalyst for me to want to continue to study this book, and I'm always drawn to it and learn something new all the time when I'm reading it. My goodness. Did not our hearts burn within, as you can tell, the love and the passion that you have for the text, even in the midst of describing it now. Peter's got a question for us, and I'm looking to find one more question about, I'm thinking about sometimes, like in the

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prophetic books, the hope comes at the end, is tacked on at the end. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that small, bright, hopeful center in the very middle of the text. Yeah, I see that as, it is a, it is a intersession. It's a moment of respite.

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It provides a interlude, it's a transition. So, but to get to that middle spot in Lamentations, Lamentations says, to get to me, you have to start with chapters one, two, and part of three. Maybe it's the center of the storm.

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Yes. And it's also, I also teach this idea that from that, the location of that group of verses is resisting the sometimes human desire to want to just be in a place of happiness or to jump to the positivity that you would maybe find in the gospel message. There's something to be said about lingering in the trauma, lingering in the suffering before we get to that place.

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And then it drops right back in. You know, you leave that wonderful space of understanding God as merciful and this newness and love of God. And then you go right back to the intensity of violence that is, that one warrior is facing.

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And then the whole graphic description of his incarceration and feeling like he's being drowned in a cistern. It's, yeah. Absolutely outstanding. Thank you, Dr.

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Cuellar, immensely. Thank you very much, Austin, for this amazing lecture, but also being the final cultivating ideas for the academic year. Truly just outstanding. Blessings on you and your scholarship, and I look forward to seeing...

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So when does the when does the book come out? Well, I have already a contract with Fortress Press. So they need the manuscript in by 2027. So it should be out that year, 2027.

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Wonderful. Looking forward to it. Yes, thank you. Thank you very much.

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And thank you, Peter, as well. So thank you very much. With that being said, that's going to conclude our time here for cultivating ideas. Dr.

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Puyar, again, thank you immensely, I think, for this wonderful lecture. And we look forward to seeing the scholarship that will come forward from this and discussions therein. Thanks, everyone, for joining us for this academic year. We hope you have a fantastic day and week.

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For those of y'all who are students, good luck on your final exams. And take care, and we will see you in the fall. Blessings, everyone. Take care, everybody.