Accidental: Rebuilding a Life After Taking One

Vicar Peters (Post-Traumatic God) delivers a deeply felt and eminently thoughtful sermon on picking up the pieces of one’s life after unintentionally causing injury or death. At 19, Peters was driving on a highway in West Virginia when he rounded a bend, overcorrected his VW Beetle, and crashed into traffic, killing a 22-year-old woman on an oncoming motorcycle. While he faced no legal consequences—the lawsuit against him was dropped—“in my soul, I knew” there was “no going back to innocence.” Writing that “preventable injuries” are the third most common cause of death in the United States, the author unpacks the complex ramifications of “moral injury” (the inescapable sense of having violated a fundamental human law) experienced by soldiers returning from war as well as those responsible for medical errors, accidental shootings, or car crashes. After offering consolation to those who’ve caused such tragedies in the book’s first chapters, Peters analyzes how America’s laws and culture enable avoidable deaths, including those related to cars, guns, and police shootings, and concludes by outlining his approach to absolution (“the final declaration of God’s forgiveness”). Peters’s message is unfailingly empathetic, and his prose is an effective mix of unassuming and devastating, as when he describes getting into a motorcycle accident years after the car crash: “I remember not being scared... it felt like it was meant to be.” Sensitive and unflinching, this sheds light on the complex morality of an unpredictable world. (Nov.)