FUNCTIONAL MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (fMRI) DETECTS DEGREES of consciousness in a few vegetative patients, despite the difficulty of establishing any form of communication with them at the bedside. What are the implications of our understanding of consciousness in defining one's identity? How do we care for these patients? To answer these questions, I propose relationality as an appropriate ethical resource. Relationality supports a renewed understanding of consciousness, identity, and care; it addresses the associated ethical issues; and it characterizes who we are, how we understand ourselves theologically, and how, through discernment, we promote justice and love.

IN THIS ESSAY I ASSERT THAT AFFLUENT CONSUMER CULTURES INCULCATE in their residents certain forms of desiring. One of those forms tends to silence the complicity that the affluent enjoy through appropriating the material benefits that come to them through the labor and poor living conditions of people in domestic and global poverty. A prime example is the cheap food that political policy and economic structures promote. The affluent are themselves spiritually stunted through the dynamics of complicity. The essay suggests that contrition is a gift of grace in the face of complicity. Consumerism blocks contrition; that is the operative dynamic here. The failure to be contrite blocks the work of grace in people's lives. However, contrition can slingshot those who experience the Christian vision of desire into a budding transformation which reeducates their desires. Some of those consequences involve a redirection of our sensory experience and an increase in community and compassion.

Moral injury, the experience of having acted (or consented to others acting) incommensurably with one's most deeply held moral conceptions, is increasingly recognized by the mental health disciplines to be associated with postcombat traumatic stress. In this essay I argue that moral injury is an important and useful clinical construct but that the phenomenon of moral injury beckons beyond the structural constraints of contemporary psychology toward something like moral theology. This something, embodied in specific communal practices, can rescue moral injury from the medical model and the means—end logic of techne and can allow for truthful, contextualized narration of and healing from morally fragmenting combat experiences.

This essay addresses two growing edges of the just war tradition. First, theorists have been accused of focusing narrowly on justifying war (jus ad bellum) and governing its conduct (jus in bello), neglecting wider considerations that encompass justice during the years prior to and after war. Second, calling a war "just" allegedly makes it seem "good" so that it is easier to fight a war and to bend or set aside the rules. Based on "imperfect justice," we argue for a "justified" war theory, taking all criteria and categories seriously, including jus ante bellum and jus post bellum.

President Barack Obama entered office with a promise to change the style and substance of his predecessor's foreign policy. This essay evaluates his efforts by identifying the key policy goals and principled underpinnings of what might be called an Obama Doctrine. I argue that Obama's distinctive worldview, which holds idealism and realism in generative tension, is deeply rooted in Niebuhrian Christian realism yet diverges from it in important ways. I close with a brief articulation of an Obama Doctrine that reflects the president's perspective on the proper role of American power and influence in the world.