This paper session engages with the concepts of “moral injury” and recovery in light of AAR’s 2026 presidential theme of the future. The session places moral injury in global, transnational, and intersectional contexts, and shows how the forms of oppression and injury the concept can illuminate and clarify discursively also become sites for recovery, possibility, solidarity, and imagining a viable future together. With the rise of authoritarianism around the world, dystopian visions of the future are increasingly popular. Oppressive and unjust ethical, religious, legal, and moral frameworks in the West disguised as progress, fairness, and civility have resulted in amplified physical, semiotic, and psychic violence directed toward minority groups across the globe. Spiritual, communal, and cultural forms of response and response-ability to these moral, epistemic and hermeneutic conditions motivate the proceedings of the session and address the fate of our futurity in an age of precarity.
Black contemporary gospel music provides a womanist method for spiritual care and physical healing. However, little scholarship has examined the capacity for gospel music to heal Black women against the health-reducing factors necessitating their healing, especially the physically and spiritually deleterious effects of stress and, upon accumulation, moral injury. Black women within the United States face particular psychological-spiritual distress resulting from intersectional stress due to the multidimensional oppression imposed on them along race, gender, class, and age. Given that music interventions offer a scalable, cost-effective approach to alleviate physiological stress and psychological stress, this paper proposes the first-ever framework and evidence-base identifying the stress-reducing qualities of Black contemporary gospel music in order to guide the development of gospel music interventions specifically tailored to Black women’s lived experiences with intersectional stress and moral injury.
This paper engages Miranda Fricker's framework of epistemic injustice and Jonathan Shay's theory of moral injury to examine the intersections of epistemic injustice, moral injury, and moral repair in diasporic contexts.
This paper examines the moral injuries experienced by American Protestant missionaries during the Nanjing Massacre and the Nanking Safety Zone (1937–1938), arguing that their suffering reveals moral injury less as an individual pathology than as a sign of systemic failure. Drawing on diaries, letters, and reports by Minnie Vautrin, Miner Searle Bates, George Fitch, and Robert Wilson, the paper analyzes how humanitarian and spiritual labor under conditions of occupation, scarcity, and violence produced distinct forms of moral injury, including guilt over exclusion, indirect collusion, remorse over misjudgment, and anguish under impossible triage. In conversation with current debates over defining “moral injury disorder,” the paper argues that pathologizing moral injury risks shifting attention away from institutional betrayal and structural violence. The Nanjing case shows that spiritual caregivers themselves may be uniquely vulnerable, and that moral injury can function as an embodied political and theological critique.