Theology & Ethics

"Formed by War," is an updated rewrite by the author of Christianity Today's JUNE 2015 cover article, "War Torn: Christianity & the Soul," in which I and others were interviewed on the topic of moral injury, PTSD and the church's role in healing that showcases my research with soldiers, trauma and resiliency. 

The online edition is available on the publisher's site at https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2015/june/formed-by-war-ptsd.html.

Ethical Decision Making Process for use in military medicine.  Published in the Dec 2016 edition of the quarterly journal THE MILITARY CHAPLAIN  The online edition can be found at: https://www.mca-usa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/TMC_Winter-2016_web.pdf

Understanding a patient's story is integral to providing ethically supportable and practical recommendations that can improve patient care. Important skills include how to elicit an individual's story, how to weave different narrative threads together, and how to assist the care team, patients, and care-givers to resolve difficult decisions or moral dilemmas. Narrative approaches to ethics consultation deepen dialogue and stakeholders' engagement to reveal important values, preferences , and beliefs that may prove critical in resolving care challenges. Recognizing barriers to narrative inquiry, such as patients who are unable or refuse to share their story, is also important. In this article we offer specific steps and guidelines that ethicists can follow to systematically elicit and construct patients' stories. We provide a case example to illustrate how a narrative approach to ethics consultation illuminates salient ethical issues that may otherwise go unnoticed. We argue that this approach should be part of every consult-ant's tool kit.

(Excerpt)
"In society’s quest for scientific gains, particularly when conducting medical research, it is imperative our ethical standards are never sacrificed on the altar of knowledge. This is particularly true for research conducted with human participants—and exponentially so for individuals who lack the ability to consent for themselves—a category of individuals which includes, among others, children (FDA2019a). This intentional ethical restraint in human subjects research makes it particularly complicated to think about conducting research for diseases that either only
occur in youth or those, such as Pediatric Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (pSLE), that manifest and
exhibit differently and with different mortality/morbidity rates than when onset occurs in adulthood
(Weiss2012). In these instances it becomes necessary to determine which is the lesser harm: not learning about the potential treatments designed specifically to counter the progress of a disease and its unique progression in younger participants; or taking limited,controlled risk (even if greater than minimal) in an effort to benefit those currently suffering and potentially ease that of those who may encounter the condition in the future. The FDA has very specific guidelines which restrict and/or allow research with children in studies that impose greater than minimal risk upon its participants, which are listed in the “Common Rule,”specifically in 21 CFR 50 Subpart D (FDA2019a)."