Volume 38, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2018
Karen V. Guth
Pages 167-186
Moral Injury, Feminist and Womanist Ethics, and Tainted Legacies
The prevalence of tainted legacies within Christian ethics, across the academy, and in contemporary public debate raises difficult questions about handling legacies implicated in traumatic pasts. This essay uses the concept of moral injury to illuminate the moral complexities of tainted religious legacies (e.g., John Howard Yoder’s) and employs feminist and womanist ethics to provide strategies for moral repair in the wake of these and other such legacies (e.g., Georgetown University’s participation in slavery). It first argues that, despite significant limitations, moral injury provides purchase on the experience of encountering tainted religious legacies by naming the type of agency involved, describing the moral harm tainted legacies cause, and highlighting the social and institutional context of that harm. It then argues that feminist and womanist responses to morally injurious forms of Christianity—particularly explorations of redemptive suffering—not only resonate with responses to Yoder’s case and other tainted legacies current in public debate but also provide criteria for assessing those responses.