About this item
Taylor Schumann never thought she'd be a victim of gun violence. But one spring day a man with a shotgun walked into her workplace and opened fire on her. While she survived, she was left with permanent wounds, both visible and invisible. In When Thoughts and Prayers Aren't Enough, Taylor invites us to see what it means to be a survivor after the news vehicles drive away and the media moves on. Healing is slow and complicated. As she suffered through surgeries, grueling rehabilitation, and counseling to repair the physical injuries and emotional trauma, she came face to face with the deep and lasting impact of gun violence. As she began grappling with the realities, Taylor experienced another painful truth: Christians have largely been absent from this issue.
About the Author
Taylor Schumann has always been a writer, but it was a spring day in 2013 that made her an activist. The bullet that tore through her left hand on an otherwise average afternoon at New River Community College in Christiansburg, Virginia, redefined the trajectory of the written word for Taylor, assigning mission to her talent and essential, urgent purpose to her page. In the split-second moment of the shooting, and the long work of healing and trauma recovery that followed, her beliefs about gun reform, thoughts and prayers, and the role of the church in our nation's historic and future violence were irreversibly altered. Alive in the gratitude of the aftermath, she writes the truth of her own story, and the stories of the countless precious lives affected daily by the crisis of gun violence, to implore us to meet the suffering around us with our whole-hearted attention. She writes to ask, simply, that we resist the impulse to look away. As the mother of a young son, Henry, Taylor seeks to hold the American Christian church accountable to its pro-life claims. At home in Charleston, South Carolina, and across the nation, she's witnessed the entrenchment of church and gun culture, and the apparent moral disconnect wreaking havoc on our ability to effect positive change. It is her hope that this story will be the place we join hands and ignite in passionate advocacy to create a better future for Henry and the rest of our children. It is her desire to write our swords into plowshares, our apathy into action, and the distance between us into common ground.
