This book brings together leading interdisciplinary scholars to broaden and deepen the conversation about moral injury. In the original chapters, the contributors present new research to show how the humanities are crucial for understanding the expressions, meaning, and significance of moral injury.
Moral injury is the disorientation we suffer when we are complicit in some moral transgression. Most existing works address moral injury from a clinical or neuroscientific perspective. The chapters in this volume show how the humanities are crucial for understanding the meaning and significance of moral injury as well as suggesting how to grapple with its lived challenges. The chapters address the conceptual, sociological, historical, and ritualistic dimensions of moral injury across three thematic sections. Section 1 explores how tools of the humanities provide new lenses for understanding conceptual and genealogical themes about moral injury. Section 2 highlights the experiences of moral injury in combat soldiers, law enforcement, and noncombatants such as photojournalists. These chapters examine the power and limits to theorizing moral phenomena by appeals to lived experience. Section 3 considers how humanistic inquiry illuminates important dimensions of the aftermath of moral injury beyond the scope of clinical research. These chapters consider how ritual, relationship repair, and atonement might shape the ways people navigate moral injury and consider how such responses shape our understanding of what we owe to one another.
Moral Injury and the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Perspectives is an essential resource for researchers and advanced students in philosophy, religious studies, literature, journalism, and the arts who are interested in moral injury.
Andrew I. Cohen, Ph.D., is a Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Jean Beer Blumenfeld Center for Ethics at Georgia State University. He is the author of Philosophy, Ethics, and Public Policy (Routledge, 2015) and Apologies and Moral Repair: Rights, Duties and Corrective Justice (Routledge, 2020). He has edited or co-edited books on applied ethics and public policy. His current research focuses on the requirements of corrective justice. Cohen currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics. With Jennifer A. Samp and Kathryn McClymond, Cohen investigated moral injury through a study funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Kathryn McClymond, Ph.D., is Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, Oglethorpe University. Prior to that, McClymond was a Professor of Religious Studies at Georgia State University where she served as Department Chair and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs. McClymond is a comparative scholar of religions, with a particular interest in religion, ritual, and violence. McClymond's most recent book, Ritual Gone Wrong: What We Learn from Ritual Disruption (2016), examines a range of case studies of ritual gone wrong, exploring what we learn about the nature of ritual itself by studying ritual mistakes, sabotage, misappropriation, and failure. Her first book, Beyond Sacred Violence: A Comparative Study of Sacrifice (Georgia Author of the Year Award 2009), argued against prevailing conceptions of sacrifice as a violent, destructive activity.
