Books by "Dr. Brad E. Kelle"
3 books found
Although most church leaders honor their veterans, many may not truly understand the issues of returning warriors, be consciously aware of the aid the church can and should offer to returning warriors, and how important the role of the pastor, fellow veterans, and the congregation is in helping the warrior find grace, peace, and forgiveness. Dr. James Taylor, a seasoned chaplain and military veteran, shares real-life stories and other insights that guide pastors through the process of providing soul care to veterans returning to civilian society after serving their country. He focuses on the pastors’ awareness of themselves and their historic authority to provide spiritual care, helps them understand the emotional and cultural move that occurs as one enters military service, links the soul wounding found in scripture and church history with combat events, introduces acceptance and commitment therapy as a values-based system, provides theological understanding and support for soul care to be seen as a pastoral issue, and offers biblical examples of moral injury. Included are insights on how pastors can offer support for wounded souls through spiritual reintegration and restoration of the soul. Moral Injury provides an understanding of military life and trauma to help pastors and their congregations understand their unique role in supporting soul wounded veterans return home from serving their country.
The Bible and Moral Injury offers an exploration (with case studies) of the interpretation of biblical texts, especially war-related narratives and ritual descriptions from the Old Testament, in conversation with research on the emerging notion of moral injury within psychology, military studies, philosophy, and ethics. This book explores two questions simultaneously: What happens when we read biblical texts, especially biblical stories of war and violence, in light of emerging research on moral injury?, and What does the study of biblical texts and their interpretation contribute to the emerging work on moral injury among other fields and with veterans, chaplains, and other practitioners? The book begins by explaining the concept of moral injury as it has developed within psychology, military studies, chaplaincy, and moral philosophy, especially through work with veterans of the U.S. military’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A major part of this work has been the attempt to identify means of healing, recovery, and repair for those morally injured by their experiences in combat or in similar situations. A key element for the book is that one feature of work on moral injury has been the appeal by psychologists and others to ancient texts and cultures for models of both the articulation of moral injury and possible means of prevention and healing. These appeals have, at times, referenced Old Testament texts that describe war-related rituals, practices, and experiences (e.g., Numbers 31). Additionally, work on moral injury within other fields has used ancient texts in another way—namely, as a means to offer creative re-readings of ancient literary characters as exemplars of warriors and experiences related to moral injury. For example, scholars have re-read the tales of Achilles and Odysseus in The Iliad and The Odyssey in dialogue with the experiences of American veterans of the Vietnam war and the moral struggles of combat and homecoming. Alongside these trends, consideration of moral injury has increasingly made its way into works on pastoral theology, Christian chaplaincy, and moral theology and ethics. These initial interpretive moves suggest a need for an extended and full-orbed examination of the interpretation of biblical texts in dialogue with the emerging formulation and practices of moral injury and recovery. This book will not simply be an effort to interpret various biblical texts through the lens of moral injury. It also seeks to explore and suggest what critical interpretation of the biblical texts can contribute to the work on moral injury going on not only among chaplains and pastoral theologians but also among psychologists, veterans’ psychiatrists, and moral philosophers. In the end, The Bible and Moral Injury suggests that current formulations of moral injury provide a helpful lens for re-reading the Bible’s texts related to war and violence but also that biblical texts and their interpretation offer resources for those working to understand and express the realities of moral injury and its possible means of healing and repair.
While honoring the historical context and literary diversity of the Old Testament, Telling the Old Testament Story is a thematic reading that construes the OT as a complex but coherent narrative. Unlike standard, introductory textbooks that only cover basic background and interpretive issues for each Old Testament book, this introduction combines a thematic approach with careful exegetical attention to representative biblical texts, ultimately telling the macro-level story, while drawing out the multiple nuances present within different texts and traditions. The book works from the Protestant canonical arrangement of the Old Testament, which understands the story of the Old Testament as the story of God and God’s relationship with all creation in love and redemption—a story that joins the New Testament to the Old. Within this broader story, the Old Testament presents the specific story of God and God’s relationship with Israel as the people called, created, and formed to be God’s covenant partner and instrument within creation. The Old Testament begins by introducing God’s mission in Genesis. The story opens with the portrait of God’s good, intended creation of right-relationships (Gen 1—2) and the subsequent distortion of that good creation as a result of humanity’s rebellion (Gen 3—11). Genesis 12 and following introduce God’s commitment to restore creation back to the right-relationships and divine intentions with which it began. Coming out of God’s new covenant engagement with creation in Gen 9, this divine purpose begins with the calling of a people (who turn out to be the manifold descendants of Abraham and Sarah) to be God’s instrument of blessing for all creation and thus to reverse the curse brought on by sin. The diverse traditions that comprise the remainder of the Pentateuch then combine to portray the creation and formation of Israel as a people prepared to be God’s instrument of restoration and blessing. As the subsequent Old Testament books portray Israel’s life in the land and journey into and out of exile, the reader encounters complex perspectives on Israel’s attempts to understand who God is, who they are as God’s people, and how, therefore, they ought to live out their identity as God’s people within God’s mission in the world. The final prophetic books that conclude the Protestant Old Testament ultimately give the story of God’s mission and people an open-ended quality, suggesting that God’s mission for God’s people continues and leading Christian readers to consider the New Testament’s story of the Church as an extension and expansion of the broader story of God introduced in the Old Testament. The main methodological perspective that informs the book includes work on the phenomenological function of narrative (especially story’s function to shape the identity and practice of the reader), as well as more recent so-called “missional” approaches to reading Christian scripture. Canonical criticism provides the primary means for relating the distinctive voices within the Old Testament texts that still honor the particularity and diversity of the discrete compositions. Accessibly written, this book invites readers to enter imaginatively into the biblical story and find the Old Testament's lively and enduring implications.