Gabriella Lettini
in Moral injury
Italian-American theological ethicist (ThD), Aurelia Henry Reinhardt Professor of Theological Ethics and former Dean of the Faculty at Starr King School for the Ministry (Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley). Long-standing pastoral and academic work with conscientious objectors, war resisters, and military families.
Stake§
Lettini writes from Unitarian Universalist seminary education and from extensive direct work with veterans and their families. The stake is pastoral and political: she argues that civilian communities — not only chaplains and clinicians — bear responsibility for the moral repair of those who fought in their name, and that liberal religious traditions have under-engaged with veterans relative to their evangelical and Catholic counterparts.
Lettini is co-author with Rita Nakashima Brock of Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After War (Beacon Press, 2012). The book is the founding text of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School, where Lettini and Brock have run veteran-clergy training intensives since the early 2010s. Within the moral-injury literature she is the figure most attentive to the experience of conscientious objectors and selective resisters, who sit awkwardly inside both the clinical and the chaplaincy framings.