Volume 38, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2018
Vic McCracken
Pages 59-76
Can Love Walk the Battlefield?
A Reply to Nigel Biggar
This essay considers more closely Nigel Biggar’s account of the role love plays in orienting and qualifying the moral experience of just warriors. The evidence that Biggar employs is highly selective and belies a more complex picture of the motivations of soldiers, the experience of killing, and the moral ends of training for modern warfare. This essay argues that a more ambivalent account of love can be reconciled more easily with recent research on the experience of moral injury among combat veterans and is a more useful starting point for grounding the Christian community’s service to combat veterans.