Warren Kinghorn
in Moral injury
American psychiatrist and theologian (MD, Harvard; ThD, Duke Divinity School), Esther Colliflower Associate Professor of the Practice of Pastoral and Moral Theology at Duke Divinity School and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center. Practising VA psychiatrist (Durham VA Medical Center) alongside the academic appointments. The unusual MD/ThD combination is the distinctive feature — most figures in the field are clinicians-trained-in-theology or theologians-engaged- with-clinicians, but rarely both at once.
Stake§
Kinghorn writes from a Hauerwasian Christian-ethics position (Stanley Hauerwas was his ThD supervisor) that is openly sceptical of the assumption that psychiatric categories exhaust the moral content of the conditions they name. The stake is twofold: clinical, in that he treats veterans diagnosed with PTSD inside the VA system; and theological, in that he is arguing that the practices required to address what the diagnosis names are practices of a kind that the clinic cannot supply on its own.
Kinghorn's 2012 Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics article "Combat Trauma and Moral Fragmentation: A Theological Account of Moral Injury" is the standard academic-theology treatment of the construct. The argument is that moral injury, as named by Shay and reformulated by Litz, beckons beyond contemporary psychology — that the phenomenon is genuinely a moral and theological one and that situating it inside psychiatric categories is a category mistake that obscures what the affected veterans actually need.
Kinghorn occupies the academic-theological corner of the field alongside Brock and Lettini, with the difference that his interlocutors are largely the clinical literature itself — the article reads partly as friendly critique aimed at Litz's framework — rather than chaplaincy practice or feminist liberation theology.