Moral injury and the ethics of teaching tainted legacies

Cases like that of John Howard Yoder - a pacifist theorist who perpetrated sexual violence - raise difficult questions about teaching material implicated in traumatic pasts. This paper argues that moral injury provides a useful framework for understanding the dynamics of teaching prominent cases of tainted legacies like Yoder's and for developing best pedagogical practices across the field of religious ethics. The moral injury framework empowers students to think critically and self-reflectively about authority, conceptions of the good, the various stakes for different persons and communities in social issues, and the need for moral repair. It establishes the importance of professor and student preparation; propels students into the moral questioning and analysis that constitutes ethics; draws attention to the connections between and intersectionality of various moral problems while also attending to important moral distinctions; and affords opportunities to study individual and institutional efforts at moral repair.