“You may come home feeling good, you did your duty, you helped people, you helped keep your unit alive. Then at some point you may start to think,” observes Rita Nakashima Brock of the Soul Repair Center at Brite Divinty School, “who am I that I could do those things? That’s when moral injury kicks in.” More →

June 13, 2014

“It is not that you ever forget what happened to you in war, it is part of your life story. There are no other institutions in our society that I know of except religious institutions that support people over their entire life course.” More →

June 13, 2014

After ten years of war, says Georgetown University ethics professor Nancy Sherman, US troops are coming home from Iraq, “and now they see that whole project of stability and democratization unraveling. They come home carrying heavy invisible wounds, of a sense of betrayal and PTSD. Was it worth it?” More →

January 20, 2012

“The people who are paying the costs, military families, veterans, civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan—those people deserve to have their story told,” says Professor Catherine Lutz of Brown University. More →

September 9, 2011

“Whether we’re actually preserving veterans’ capacity to have a flourishing life afer war, a good life for a human being after war, I don’t know. I just don’t know,” says clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay. More →

March 11, 2011

“Soldiers carry all the moral weight of war, and we carry very little, and we need to share that moral burden by realizing that they are our surrogates,” according to philosopher, ethicist, and psychoanalyst Nancy Sherman, author of “The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers.” More →

March 11, 2011

“To do the war on the cheap and not hold us all accountable for the decisions that are made is a travesty,” says this New York National Guard state chaplain. More →

March 11, 2011

“Part of what’s in a pilgrim’s heart is this longing for more in life and the idea of being on a journey,” says Randy Haycock, a chaplain at Walter Reed Army Medical Center who leads monthly pilgrimages to Washington National Cathedral for Walter Reed’s Warrior Transition Brigade. More →

October 22, 2010

Revisit our November 2007 Web-only essay on dealing with the spiritual and moral pain of war. “My sense is that this is a fundamentally religious issue,” says clinical psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, an expert on combat trauma. “It’s possible to package it as a mental health issue, but I think we lose out.” More →

November 6, 2009