Introduction to Exploring Moral Injury in Sacred Texts

Journal of Religion and Violence, 2016

Moral Infringement and Repair in Antiquity. Supplement 1: Emotions and Hierarchies, 2022

Moral Infringement and Repair in Antiquity, is a series of publications related to a project on Dynamics of Moral Repair in Antiquity, run by Thomas Kazen and Rikard Roitto between 2017 and 2021, and funded by the Swedish Research Council. The volumes contain stand-alone articles and serve as supplements to the main outcome of the project, the volume Interpersonal Infringement and Moral Repair: Revenge, Compensation and Forgiveness in the Ancient World, forthcoming on Mohr Siebeck in 2023. Supplement 1: Emotions and Hierarchies, contains four articles and chapters by Thomas Kazen. Three of them are republished in accordance with the publishers' general conditions for author reuse. The fourth has not been published before. 1. Emotional Ethics in Biblical Texts: Cultural Construction and Biological Bases of Morality. 2. Viewing Oneself through Others' Eyes: Shame between Biology and Culture in Biblical Texts. 3. Law and Emotion in Moral Repair: Circumscribing Infringement. 4. Retribution and Repair in Voluntary Associations: Comparing Rule Texts from Qumran, Collegia, and Christ Groups.

New Ideas in Psychology, 2018

While the concept of moral injury has been embraced in academic, clinical and public discourses, it is still nascent and needs development regarding the ‘moral’ in ‘moral injury’. When questions about the complex nature of morality go unaddressed, clinical practice is based on unsubstantiated and possibly reductive assumptions about the moral dimensions of traumas. Current conceptualizations of moral injury approach morality implicitly as a harmonious belief system. However, people always have multiple moral commitments that may co-exist in tension. What are the implications of moral tension in the experience of distress, and what are the implications of the complex nature of morality for the theoretical understanding of moral injury? This article addresses these questions, drawing on relevant literature from the fields of philosophy and social sciences, and on 80 in-depth qualitative interviews with Dutch veterans, thus contributing to a refined, interdisciplinary concept of moral injury.

The Journal of Religion (Vol. 93, No. 4), 2013

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Reflective Practice: Formation and Supervision in Ministry, 2018

This book, released just months before the author's passing, will add to Larry Graham's enduring legacy of scholarship, wisdom, and compassion among his family, colleagues, students, and the wider community. Moral injury is a construct that has emerged in recent years to describe a consequence of intense moral pain experienced by military veterans forced to make impossible moral choices in the context of war. Graham's book provides a framework to extend this construct to encompass the moral lives of all of us, particularly those who have not experienced the moral landscape of war. From the perspective of this reviewer, this frame offers both benefit and peril to the understanding of moral injury. On the one hand, broadening the frame to include everyday moral dilemmas and injuries potentially enlarges the supportive community for veterans affected by moral injury. An unintended consequence however, might be the diminishing of civilians' awareness of the unique and intensely painful experience of moral injury related to combat. The three sections of Graham's book are written to address the moral tumult religious professionals experience personally and in their role as moral healers and guides and, more generally, to guide everyday people. In the first section, after establishing the particular theological and ethnocultural lens from which he writes, Graham begins to define the moral landscape within a social context in a way that is quite consistent with recent research in moral psychology. Extending beyond the Western hierarchical and individualistic perspective on morality, Graham notes the rich