Soul Repair — Recovering from Moral Injury After War

Rita Nakashima Brock is a feminist theologian (PhD, Claremont) of Japanese-American heritage, founding director of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinity School (the seminary at Texas Christian University, established 2012); Gabriella Lettini is an 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 (Berkeley). Both came to moral injury through extensive prior pastoral work with veterans and military families; both grew up in households shaped by war (Brock's father served in the Korean and Vietnam conflicts; Lettini's family carried Italian World War II memory). The book and the Center together carried moral injury into liberal-Protestant theological education and chaplaincy training in a systematic way that no other text in the field has matched.

Soul Repair was published by Beacon Press in 2012. Beacon is the publishing arm of the Unitarian Universalist Association; the editorial filter is liberal-religious and academic-trade, with a strong list in social-justice theology. The structure of the book is unusual: rather than a monograph laying out a theory of moral injury, Brock and Lettini built it around the first-person testimony of four veterans who self-identify as morally injured — Camillo Mac Bica (Vietnam, philosopher, peace activist), Herman Keizer Jr. (Vietnam, Christian Reformed Church chaplain), Pamela Lightsey (Iraq-era, Methodist clergy), and Camilo Mejía (Iraq, conscientious objector who served prison time for refusing redeployment). The book reads as theology in dialogue with veteran prose and is closer in register to a documentary collaboration than to an academic argument.

The stake is normative and pastoral. The argument is that moral injury is a soul wound that requires communal and religious repair — that congregations, chaplains, and faith communities have a responsibility to their veterans that the clinical system cannot finally substitute for, and that liberal religious traditions have under-engaged with this responsibility relative to the evangelical and Catholic strands. The book launched the Soul Repair Center explicitly to build out the institutional infrastructure for that argument: clergy training, chaplaincy curricula, congregation materials, and ongoing research collaborations with VA and DoD chaplaincy. The Center is the practical expression of the book's claims and is part of the reason the book has the field position it does.

For the moral-injury corpus Soul Repair is the principal theological text alongside Kinghorn's 2012 Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics article. The two are complementary: Kinghorn writes academic Christian ethics aimed at the clinical literature; Brock and Lettini write a more documentary, congregation-aimed book that brings veteran voices forward as the theological data. Read after Tick and before Sherman's Afterwar, the book is the place where the field's pastoral commitments come most clearly into view.