Moral Injury among Returning Veterans: From Thank You for Your Service to a Liberative Solidarity

by Joshua Morris

Overview

This book expands the conversation on moral injury to include a more formal role for society in it. The author utilizes an interdisciplinary practical theology combining liberation theologies and cultural studies to interrogate how dominate ideologies can complicate moral injury reintegration among veterans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781793642660
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	01/27/2023
Pages:	180
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.04(h) x 0.52(d)

About the Author

Joshua T. Morris, Ph.D. is a bivocational scholar-practitioner who serves as a pediatric staff chaplain and also as a chaplain in the United States Army Reserve.

Table of Contents

1. Are We Still Over There? 2. From Disorder to Injury: Mapping the Terrain(s) 3. Hermeneutical Circles and Liberative Praxis 4. The Reification of the Veteran: Kaleidoscopic Lived Experiences 5. The Centrality of Community in Moral Injury Support: Theological and Cultural Studies Analysis 6. Oppositional Forces: Toward a Counterhegemonic Paradigm for Spiritual Care and Counseling Appendix: Note on Research Design

Editorial Reviews

Morris’s book offers an important and unique contribution to the new wave of moral injury scholarship developed in the last decade. Its approach is refreshing as it engages the moral injury of war holistically, bypassing the tendency of many scholars to see it mainly as a clinical or pastoral issue, and as such a problem of the individual. This book strives to engage moral injury though an interdisciplinary approach the honors the complexity of the issue and sees it as a collective problem that needs collective healing and liberation. One of the unique contributions of the author is to consider the figure of the military chaplain as a Gramscian organic intellectual. Morris sees the chaplain as a Gramscian organic intellectual accompanying individual solders in their healing processes while also engaging in the larger project of justice making and liberation that can truly heal the scars of war. I highly recommend this book that offers a much needed path to collective healing that is also truly liberating.

Gabriella Lettini

Chaplain Morris proposes valuable strategies for disrupting prevailing, uncritical, and individualized interpretations of veterans’ morally injurious experiences in order to help military and VA chaplains better address the distorting effects of unacknowledged ideological assumptions about war and military service that complicate healing for veterans and inhibit needed critical reflection in public life.

Nancy J. Ramsay

Morris focuses on the unique role of chaplains and theologians able to “critique the dominant ideologies of American military service to cocreate counterhegemonic spaces” for meaning making with service members experiencing moral struggles. The voices of veterans Morris interviewed compellingly call readers into solidarity with them, in a process of reintegration that uses cultural critique to explore their moral struggles as sources of wisdom. This brilliant and pre-eminently practical book demonstrates the central role of chaplains in the urgent work of spiritual care of military moral injury.

Carrie Doehring

The church has long debated war in general and the terms for a 'just' war. Recently there has been a growing interest in the moral injury of soldiers and the responsibility of both the Church and the State for them. In Moral Injury Among Returning Veterans, Morris advances the conversation by harnessing the ambiguity of military Chaplaincy for theological profundity and ecclesiological clarity. Weaving together his own experience and the testimonies of those he served in Afghanistan with a liberationist reading of Bonhoeffer, Morris invites and challenges the reader with a vision of a counter-hegemonic community. In this text, Morris reveals himself as a trusted guide to process our own failures as a church, a nation, and an academy. I am deeply grateful for this powerful text.

Tripp Fuller

Echoing Frantz Fanon and with characteristic boots on the ground, Morris identifies and critically examines the systemic ideological realities that exacerbate moral injury or interfere with its healing. He argues for creating counterhegemonic spaces of compassionate solidarity and recovery for those who suffer from moral injury. Anyone who cares for and seeks to be in solidarity with persons struggling from the traumas of war will want to read this book.

Ryan LaMothe

When soldiers return from war, civilian attitudes can amplify and complicate moral injury. In this much-needed text, Morris engages veteran’s stories of belonging, isolation, and betrayal to show how moral injury can provide wisdom and authority to help reintegrate returning soldiers. Using the film American Sniper to illustrate ideologies about war that harm veterans, Morris invites military chaplains and civilian caregivers to lead the ideological critique that can create the conditions veterans need to recover from moral injury. His liturgy of solidarity shows how to create the counter-hegemonic communities that help veterans come home and thrive.

Duane R. Bidwell

Moral Injury Among Returning Veterans offers insightful analysis and spiritual care resources for military chaplains, religious leaders, caregivers, and concerned civilians committed to the holistic wellbeing of soldiers and veterans.

Darren Cronshaw

Will we hear the voices of the morally injured? The moral responsibility of war-making is too often scapegoated to military service members, passing over the bystander civilian society whose votes and tax dollars funded the enterprise. When Morris empowers the voice of military veterans, he does so as a necessary demand for a full and relenting hearing of the truth: the moral burden must be shared by all.

Zachary Moon