UK Military chaplains are religious actors who occupy an ambiguous social location, involving membership of faith communities and the armed services. Exercising a pastoral role, they are also ‘force-multipliers’, contributing to military effectiveness. Their role as ‘moral compass’ to the services involves both contributing to the military ethos, and acting as critical friend. Further, they may act as ‘subject matter expert’ in the military’s encounter with religious leaders in theatres of operation, placing themselves in the hinterland between the military and local culture. Since 2001, Cardiff University has delivered a masters degree in chaplaincy studies, under contract to the Ministry of Defence. The programme aims to develop chaplains as reflective practitioners, equipping them with academic languages (e.g. theology; ethics, organisational theory) with which to articulate their role and identity. More recently this work has been expanded through research conducted by the Cardiff Centre for Chaplaincy Studies (founded 2008), including a project on ‘Military chaplains and the ethics of conflict’, sponsored by the British Academy. This paper, by the Centre’s Director, will offer a reflexive study of these developments, as an exercise in the narrativisation of military chaplaincy – achieved by academics and chaplains together. Drawing on discourse analytical approaches to professional practice, the paper will examine the interaction of discourses at work in the academic dissertations and associated publications, which have emerged from the Centre’s work with the military. Examples of discursive interaction ripe for comment include those between: corporate values and the morality of faith traditions; religious diversity and religious identity (including different perspectives on religious extremism); military doctrines of armed conflict and theologies of war and peace. The paper’s central aim will be to investigate the extent to which the multi-disciplinary approach to chaplaincy studies has contributed to the chaplains’ narrative construction of their ambiguous role and identity.
