Rita Nakashima Brock
in Moral injury
American theologian (PhD, Claremont), feminist theologian of Japanese-American heritage, founding director of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School (Texas Christian University, established 2012). Earlier work was on Christology and atonement theology — Saving Paradise (2008, with Rebecca Parker) is her best-known previous book. Brock is the figure who carried moral injury into theological education and chaplaincy training in a systematic way.
Stake§
Brock comes to moral injury from feminist liberation theology and from a sustained critique of Christian atonement doctrines that glorify suffering. Her stake is normative: she argues that the resources for moral repair after war are religious and communal, not pharmaceutical, and that the institutional church has a responsibility to its veterans that it has not been meeting. The Soul Repair Center is the practical expression of that argument.
Brock is co-author with Gabriella Lettini of Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After War (Beacon Press, 2012), the book that gave the term soul repair its contemporary currency in chaplaincy and veterans' ministry. The book is structured around the testimony of four veterans (Camillo Mac Bica, Herman Keizer Jr., Pamela Lightsey, Camilo Mejía) and reads as theology in dialogue with first-person veteran prose — closer in register to Soul Repair than to the Clinical Psychology Review.
For this corpus Brock occupies the explicitly theological corner of the field, alongside Warren Kinghorn's academic theology and Edward Tick's psychotherapeutic-mythopoetic work. The three are not interchangeable — Brock writes from feminist liberation theology, Kinghorn from Hauerwasian Christian ethics, Tick from cross-cultural ritual practice — but they share the conviction that moral injury is not finally a clinical category.