Overview
- Explores religion in the US military through a lived religion approach
- Investigates how religious resources and traumatic events affect the lives of Christian veterans
- Draws on post-traumatic theologies to suggest new approaches
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About this book
Serving in the military is often a disruptive event in the lives of those who join, precipitating a reassessment of the service member’s ethical sensibilities or, tragically, resulting in lasting moral injury and trauma. The military experience compels them to navigate multiple identities, from citizen to warrior and back. Their religious identity, sometimes rooted in a civilian religious community, can be altered by military participation.
Through a series of inductive, in-depth qualitative interviews, Suitt explores how varied religious resources and potentially traumatic events affect the lives of post-9/11 veterans who once or currently identified as Christian. Adding to existing research on moral injury, it traces how military chaplains, ethics education, just war theory rhetoric, and formal religious practice supplied by the military alter the course of service members’ moral lives. These narrative trajectories reveal how veterans use Christian faith or other systems of meaning-making to understand war and their identities as service members and veterans.
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Keywords
Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
"Listening to the stories of post-9/11 veterans and chaplains, Suitt reveals the complicated role religion plays in the morally fraught arena of war and the equally-fraught return to civilian life. This is a moving and deeply insightful account that matters to all of us." (Nancy Ammerman, Boston University, USA)
"Insightfully, Suitt shows that Christian religiosity, as used by the military to inculcate a warrior mentality, can create trauma as well as help heal it". (Stephanie Savell, Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs, USA)
“Through harrowing and heartening stories of veterans, Suitt makes a compelling case that faith in a warrior-god heightens risks for moral injury, and explores the healing possibilities of a post-traumatic God who suffers in solidarity with those who suffer.” (Rita Nakashima Brock, Senior Vice-President & Director of Shay Moral Injury Center, USA)Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Thomas H. (Ben) Suitt, III is a graduate of Boston University and the author of “Finding Resonance amid Trauma.” Suitt resides with his family in Franklin, TN where he teaches English at Franklin Road Academy.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Narratives of Trauma and Moral Agency among Christian Post-9/11 Veterans
Authors: Thomas Howard Suitt, III
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31082-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-31081-2Published: 24 May 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-31084-3Published: 25 May 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-31082-9Published: 23 May 2023
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 270
Topics: Christianity, Sociology of Religion, Clinical Psychology, Feminist Theology