Speaker bio page for Brian Powers

Bio

Brian is a former officer in the U.S. Air Force and a veteran of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and a graduate of Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion. He is interested in the ways that Christian theology shapes and also fails to shape our thinking about contemporary moral, ecclesial and political issues – most notably, those involving the experience of violence and moral injury, identity and justice. His recent monograph from William B. Eerdmans press is a constructive work entitled Full Darkness: A Original Sin, Moral Injury and Wartime Violence. The book contends that a modified Augustinian conception of original sin holds deep explanatory power to illuminate the nature of wartime violence, particularly through the lens of veteran trauma. He has presented papers on the resonances between Augustinian doctrines of sin and moral injury at the national gatherings of religious and anthropological scholars and has published an article in Theology Today arguing for the applicability of Augustine’s moral psychology in situations of moral trauma brought on by wartime violence. He is currently the Assistant Professor (Research) Vann Fellow in Christianity and the Armed Forces and Executive Director of the International Centre for Moral Injury at Durham University.