Investigating Moral Injury: Thinking Beyond the Law-Conscience Binary

Abstract

In _Dust in the Blood_, Jessica Coblentz notes the insufficiency of theodical approaches to theology to account for depressive suffering. Instead, she proposes a theology of depression that makes use of narrative-phenomenological portraits and draws new insights on what Christian discipleship means in the context of depressive suffering. In this article, I employ Coblentz’s framework to interrogate another area of contemporary theology. Debates about the moral authority of conscience are largely unresolved. In order to confront some points of intractable disagreement in these debates and consider a way beyond them, I study firsthand experiences of moral injury. Jonathan Shay defined moral injury as “a betrayal of what’s right by someone who holds legitimate authority in a high stakes situation.” From patterns in firsthand experiences of moral injury, I propose a respective understanding of conscience. I argue that this understanding of conscience can direct theologians beyond impasses in Catholic moral theology.