How do military chaplains contribute to the moral resilience of soldiers and veterans experiencing moral stress?

19 September 2023

Assistant Professor Carmen Schuhmann co-authored an article in Pastoral Psychology on spiritual care in the military. There has been relatively little research on this and most available studies focus mainly on moral injury.

This article contributes to the existing literature on spiritual care in the military by presenting a study of 13 case descriptions of spiritual care provision by military chaplains from the Netherlands. These were analyzed using the framework method, a qualitative method of systematically searching for patterns in data sets.

The research question was:  How do military chaplains contribute to the moral resilience of soldiers and veterans experiencing moral stress? One of the conclusions: soldiers experience conversations and brief encounters with chaplains as relational ‘moments of goodness’, which may also contribute to moral resilience.

The full article is available online: How Military Chaplains Strengthen the Moral Resilience of Soldiers and Veterans: Results From a Case Studies Project in the Netherlands.