Societal Moral Injury and the Ethics—and Teaching—of Resistance

In an era of duress, it is important to explore the ethics and moral-developmental potential of resistance for a chance at combatting and resisting societal moral injury. Less well known than liberation theology, resistance studies, from which ethics of resistance can be derived and implemented, has developed as a budding field in recent years. Resistance studies addresses the life-giving nuance inherent in dialectical thinking and offers a route for more clearly recognizing, upholding, and teaching acts of bravery and critical consciousness where they do and can happen. This paper highlights womanist ethicist Traci West’s ethics of resistance in the context of supporting battered black women and Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s erudite exploration of learning and modeling bravery as cases in point. It concludes with a nod to an investigation into the intentional cultivation of moral courage on a social level as contributing to the theory and practice of resistance ethics.