Founded in 2015, Providence examines global statecraft with Christian Realism. We are inspired by Christianity & Crisis, the journal Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr founded in 1941 to argue for the moral and geopolitical imperative of American leadership against totalitarian aggression. We believe American Christians have a special duty to interpret America’s vocation in the world today. We seek to uplift the best of historic Christian political theology, to foster wider conversation about spirituality in politics, and to create a community of serious Christian public thinkers serving America and the world.

We welcome article submissions for our website. Please see our writer’s guidelines before submitting.

Masthead

Publisher: The Institute of Religion and Democracy

Editor-in-Chief: Mark Tooley

Executive Editor: Marc LiVecche

Managing Editor: James Diddams

Contributing Editors: Matthew Andersen, J. Daryl Charles, Jeffrey Cimmino, Dean Curry, Michael C. DiCianna Trey Dimsdale, Alan Dowd, Garrett Exner, Matt N. Gobush, Siobhan Heekin-Canedy, Rebeccah Heinrichs, Jozef Andrew Kosc, Kennedy Lee, Michael Lucchese, Timothy Mallard, Jennifer Marshall, Paul Marshall, Walter Russell Mead, Tim Milosch, Eric Patterson, John Shelton, Miles Smith IV, Michael Sobolik, Jeffrey Tyler Syck, Nadya Williams

Editors-At-Large: Mark Amstutz, Nigel Biggar, Mary Habeck, Will Inboden, James Turner Johnson, Paul Miller, Robert Nicholson

Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and editor of the Institute’s foreign policy and national security journal Providence. Prior to joining the IRD, he worked for the CIA for eight years. He is also the author of Taking Back The United Methodist Church (2008) and The Peace That Almost Was (2015).

Marc LiVecche is the just war and global statecraft scholar with the Institute on Religion and Democracy, and the executive editor of Providence. He also currently serves as the McDonald Visiting Scholar at the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life at Christ Church College, Oxford University.  He completed doctoral studies at the University of Chicago, where he worked under the supervision of the political theorist and public intellectual Jean Bethke Elshtain. His dissertation took a classic just war view of the question of killing in its theological and ethical dimensions in part as a response to the crisis of moral injury. It was conferred with distinction in 2015. It was published as The Good Kill: Just War & Moral Injury by Oxford University Press in 2021. Marc’s work has been published in a number of edited volumes including The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Peace, A Persistent Fire: The Ethical Impact of World War 1 on the Profession of Arms, and Philosophers & War; and in magazines and journals including First Things, The American Spectator, Christianity Today, The Federalist, TGC Online, Salvo, The Stream, The Public Justice Report, and Comment.

James Diddams is the Managing Editor of Providence. His writing has appeared in Christianity Today, First Things, Mere Orthodoxy, Law & Liberty, Providence, the Acton Institute’s Religion and Liberty Online, and The American Conservative. He graduated with honors from Wheaton College (IL) majoring in Art History, Economics, and Philosophy and minoring in Political Science and Math. He was also a fellow with the John Jay Institute.

Mark Amstutz is a professor of political science and international relations at Wheaton College and has served on the faculty since 1972. His research has focused on the role of ethics in the conduct of foreign relations. His books include International Ethics and Evangelicals & American Foreign Policy. For more than a decade he served as a reserve naval attaché, retiring as a Commander from the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1993.

Nigel Biggar was the Regus Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology, and Director of the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life, at the University of Oxford. He is the author of In Defence of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and, most recently, Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014).

J. Daryl Charles is an affiliate scholar of the John Jay Institute and has served as the Acton Institute Affiliated Scholar in Theology & Ethics. He is author, co-author or editor of 21 books, including (with Eric Patterson) Just War and Christian Traditions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), (with Mark David Hall) America and the Just War Tradition: A History of U.S. Conflicts (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), (with David D. Corey) The Just War Tradition: An Introduction (ISI Books, 2012), (with Timothy J. Demy) War, Peace, and Christianity (Crossway, 2010), and Between Pacifism and Jihad (IVP, 2005).

Jeffrey Cimmino is a Contributing Editor with Providence. His writing has appeared in The National Interest, National Review, Spectator USA, The Washington Examiner, and other outlets.

Michael C. DiCianna is a Visiting Fellow at the Transatlantic Dialogue Center and a research assistant at the Yorktown Institute. He received his Bachelor’s degree in History and Political Science at Duquesne University and is a Master of Arts Candidate and Fellow at the Center for Intermarium Studies at the Institute for World Politics

Trey Dimsdale is the Executive Director of the Center for Religion, Culture, & Democracy (CRCD), the educational and cultural initiative of First Liberty Institute. He is also an associate fellow at the Centre for Enterprise, Markets, and Ethics in Oxford, UK. He holds a law degree from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, as well as degrees in ethics and political science.

Alan Dowd is a senior fellow with the Sagamore Institute, where he leads the Center for America’s Purpose (www.sagamoreinstitute.org/cap). In addition to Providence, Dowd’s award-winning writing has appeared in The Claremont Review of Books, Policy Review, Parameters, The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, Military Officer, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Jerusalem Post, The Financial Times Deutschland, The American, The American Legion Magazine, American Outlook, World Politics Review, Current, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Examiner, The Detroit News, The Indianapolis Star, The National Post, The Stream, byFaith and the online editions of The American Interest, The Weekly Standard and The National Review. Dowd has been a guest on Fox News Channel’s “Fox and Friends” and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Counterpoint.” In addition, he has been interviewed by Cox News Service, CBN, The Washington Times, The National Post (Canada) and numerous radio programs.

Garrett Exner is an adjunct fellow at Hudson Institute, where he writes and comments on US national defense. He is also the executive director of the Public Interest Fellowship in Washington, D.C. He previously served as a staffer to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), as a counterterrorism policy adviser in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and as a special operations officer in the Marine Corps with deployments to Iraq, North Africa, East Africa, and the South Pacific.

Thomas F. Farr is Associate Professor of the Practice of Religion and World Affairs at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. He directs the Religious Freedom Project and the Program on Religion and US Foreign Policy at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, where he is a senior fellow. He is also a senior fellow at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, NJ. Dr. Farr has served in both the U.S. Army and the American Foreign Service. Early in his Foreign Service career, Dr. Farr specialized in strategic military policy and political affairs. During the Cold War, he helped develop U.S. strategic nuclear policy and was part of the U.S. negotiating team in the U.S.-Soviet arms control talks in Geneva. In 1999 Farr became the first director of the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom, in which capacity he led American diplomatic efforts to promote religious liberty. Farr is a contributing editor for the Review of Faith and International Affairs and has published widely on religious freedom and its implications. His work has appeared in many edited volumes, and in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, the Houston Journal of International Law, the Drake Law Review, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, First Things, the Weekly Standard, the National Review, America Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Review of Faith and International Affairs, and other outlets. Farr has appeared on PBS, America Abroad, Book TV, Al Jazeera, Alhurra, EWTN, CBN, and many other media outlets. His first book, World of Faith and Freedom: Why International Religious Liberty is Vital to American National Security, was published by Oxford University Press.

Matthew Gobush is the Strategic Communications Advisor of the Afghanistan War Commission and a Contributing Editor with Providence. Previously, Mr. Gobush served as Director of Communications for the National Security Council, and as Foreign Policy Spokesman and Speechwriter in the Office of the Vice President. Prior to working at The White House, he served as a staff specialist for international and commercial programs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. During the Afghanistan War’s initial phases, Mr. Gobush was Press Secretary for the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee minority staff, and later Director of Communications for Senate Armed Services Committee member Joe Lieberman. Most recently, he was Communications Manager at Exxon Mobil Corporation. During his career, Mr. Gobush has been privileged to directly support a sitting President, Vice President, Senator, Congressman, and two Chief Executive Officers, as well as two future U.S. Secretaries of State of different political parties. He has written extensively on foreign policy, military ethics, and veterans affairs, and led the Military Chaplains Just War Education Project for the Episcopal Church. A graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, Mr. Gobush and his wife Gari Lister have six internationally adopted daughters and live in Urbanna, Virginia.

Mary Habeck is a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she writes on al-Qa’ida, ISIS, and jihadi-Salafism.  From 2005-2013 she was an Associate Professor in Strategic Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), teaching courses on military history and strategic thought.  Before coming to SAIS, Dr. Habeck taught American and European military history in Yale’s history department, 1994-2005.  She received her Ph.D. in history from Yale in 1996, an MA in international relations from Yale in 1989, and a BA in international studies, Russian, and Spanish from Ohio State in 1987.  Dr. Habeck was appointed by President Bush to the Council on the Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities (2006-2013), and in 2008-2009 she was the Special Advisor for Strategic Planning on the National Security Council staff.  In addition to books and articles on doctrine, World War I, the Spanish Civil War, and al-Qa’ida, her publications include Knowing the Enemy:  Jihadist Ideology and the War on Terror (Yale, 2005) and three forthcoming sequels, Attacking America:  Al-Qa’ida’s Grand Strategy (Basic, 2016), Managing Savagery: Al-Qa’ida’s Military and Political Strategies (2018), and Fighting the Enemy:  The U.S. and its War against al-Qa’ida (2019).

Siobhan Heekin-Canedy is a freelance writer on topics including international affairs, religion, sports, and feminism and a Contributing Editor with Providence. She holds a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts from Thomas Aquinas College. From 2008-2014, Siobhan represented Ukraine as an elite-level ice dancer, ultimately competing in the 2014 Winter Olympics. She and her husband Michael are the proud parents of two daughters, Maris Stella and Olympia. You can follow Siobhan’s work on X (Twitter) @SiobhanHC_OLY and on Substack at olympianessays.substack.com.

Rebeccah L. Heinrichs is a fellow at Hudson Institute where she provides research and commentary on a variety of international security issues and specializes in deterrence and counter-proliferation. She is also the vice-chairman of the John Hay Initiative’s Counter-proliferation Working Group and the original manager of the House of Representatives Bi-partisan Missile Defense Caucus.

William Inboden is an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and executive director of the Clements Center for History, Strategy, and Statecraft at the University of Texas-Austin. He is also a distinguished scholar at the Strauss Center for International Security, a non-resident fellow with the German Marshall Fund of the United States, senior advisor with Avascent International, and an associate scholar with the Berkley Center’s Religious Freedom Project. Previously he served as senior vice president of the Legatum Institute and senior director for the White House’s Strategic Planning on the National Security Council. Inboden also worked at the Department of State as a member of the Policy Planning Staff and special advisor in the Office of International Religious Freedom. He is the author of Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment (2008) and a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine.

James Turner Johnson (Ph.D., Princeton 1968) is Distinguished Professor of Religion and Associate of the Graduate Program in Political Science at Rutgers—The State University of New Jersey, where he has been on the faculty since 1969.  His research and teaching have focused principally on the historical development and application of the Western and Islamic moral traditions related to war, peace, and the practice of statecraft.

Jozef Andrew Kosc, KHS, PhD is a diplomatic historian, political scientist, and former senior national security analyst. He completed his DPhil as a British Commonwealth Doctoral Scholar at the University of Oxford, where he authored a revisionist history of the Anglo-American Iraq War (2003-11), drawing on thousands of newly declassified sources.

Dr. Kosc currently serves as an America in the World Consortium Fellow at the Hamilton Center, University of Florida, and as a fellow at the Bill Graham Center for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto. In 2019, Dr. Kosc was invested into the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, a chivalric order under the protection of the Holy See (the Vatican), in recognition of his support for the Christian presence in the Middle East.

Kennedy Lee is chief of staff for an international bestselling author and columnist. She previously worked at Hudson Institute as research associate and program manager with the Keystone Defense Initiative and Center on Europe and Eurasia. Lee is consulting editor of the Tikvah Fund’s Solomon Journal and has taught numerous classes for Tikvah’s high school fellowships. She also writes on US culture and foreign policy, with a particular focus on Eurasia and transatlantic relations and security. She is also a Contributing Editor with Providence. Her writing has been featured in National Review, Law & Liberty, Providence, Real Clear Defense, New Eastern Europe, Deseret News, and more.

Michael Lucchese is the founder of Pipe Creek Consulting, a communications firm based in Washington, D.C. Prior to that, he was a communications aide to U.S. Senator Ben Sasse. He graduated from Hillsdale College in 2018, and in 2017 was a Political Studies Fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is also a Krauthammer Fellow with the Tikvah Fund. His writing has also appeared in the Washington Examiner and National Review.

Timothy Mallard is Professor of Leadership and Ethics at Birmingham Theological Seminary and a Visiting Research Fellow at St. Chad’s College and Durham University (UK). A recently retired U.S. Army Chaplain (Colonel), he is the author of Moral and Spiritual Injury in War: Russo-Ukraine, Israel-Iran, and Beyond and was Senior Editor of A Persistent Fire: The Strategic Ethical Impact of World War I on the Global Profession of Arms. He holds a Ph.D. in Theological Ethics from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, an M.S.S. in Strategic Leadership from the U.S. Army War College, and is a certified Army Strategist. He has deployed to combat as a Battalion, Brigade, and Division Chaplain in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and held strategic postings at both US Army Europe and Africa and the Pentagon. His military decorations include two awards each of the Legion of Merit and Bronze Star medals, the Combat Action Badge, and the Purple Heart.

Jennifer A. Marshall is vice president for the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity and Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and a senior research fellow with the Institute of Theology and Public Life at Reformed Theological Seminary, Washington, DC.

Paul Marshall is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Religion as well as Jerry and Susie Wilson Professor of Religious Freedom at Baylor University, a Senior Fellow at the Leimena Institute in Jakarta, and a Visiting Professor at the Graduate School of Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) in Jakarta. He has written and edited more than twenty books on religion and politics, especially religious freedom. He is in frequent demand for lectures and media appearances, including interviews on ABC Evening News, CNN, PBS, Fox, the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Al Jazeera. His work has been published in, or is the subject of, articles in the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Boston Globe, Dallas Morning News, Christian Science Monitor, First Things, New Republic, Weekly Standard, Reader’s Digest, and many other newspapers and magazines.

Walter Russell Mead is the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at Hudson Institute, the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft at the University of Florida, and the Global View Columnist at The Wall Street Journal. He is also a Contributing Editor with Providence.

Tim Milosch is a lecturer in the Political Science Department at Biola University and a faculty fellow with Braver Angels’ College Debates and Discourse Alliance.  He completed his doctoral studies at Claremont Graduate University in 2022 where he did research on the effects of political cultures on international crises. He currently teaches courses on international affairs and national security at Biola and writes about those subjects even more on Substack at Tim Talks Politics. He’s also been published on Mere Orthodoxy and appeared on The Babylon Bee podcast (to discuss the serious topic of US-China relations).

Robert Nicholson is Editor-at Large of Providence magazine, co-founder and board member of Save Armenia, founder of The Philos Project, and co-founder of Passages Israel. Robert also serves on the advisory board of In Defense of Christians and The Hague Initiative for International Cooperation (thinc). A formerly enlisted Marine and Tikvah Fellow, he holds a BA in Hebrew Studies from Binghamton University, and a JD and MA in Middle Eastern History from Syracuse University. His written work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Telegraph, New York Post, Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Newsweek, First Things, The Hill, and National Interest.

Eric Patterson, PhD, is a Providence contributing editor and President and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. Previously, he served as President of the Religious Freedom Institute and Dean and Professor in the Robertson School of Government at Regent University in Virginia Beach, VA. He is the author or editor of 11 books, including Ending Wars Well, Ethics Beyond War’s End, Debating the War of Ideas, and, with Timothy Demy, the just-released Philosophers on War.

John Shelton is the policy advisor for Advancing American Freedom. He received degrees from Duke Divinity School and the University of Virginia, and lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, Katelyn, and their children.

Miles Smith is a historian of the American South and the Atlantic World. He has taught at Hillsdale College, Regent University, and Texas Christian University. His research interests and his writing focus on intellectual life and religion in the Nineteenth-Century United States and Europe. He lives in Hillsdale, Michigan.

Michael Sobolik is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute where he specializes in United States–China relations and great power competition with a focus on geopolitics, net assessments, and competitive strategies. He is also the author of Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance (Naval Institute Press, 2024), as well as a contributing editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy. Mr. Sobolik was previously a senior fellow in Indo-Pacific studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, as well as a legislative assistant to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the United States Senate.

Jeffery Tyler Syck is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and the Director of the Center for Public Service and Outreach at the University of Pikeville. Tyler’s academic research focuses on the development of American democracy and the history of political ideologies. He is the editor of the forthcoming book “A Republic of Virtue: The Political Essays of John Quincy Adams” and is completing a second book manuscript entitled “The Untold Origins of American Democracy.” His essays and articles on politics, philosophy, and history have appeared in several public facing publications including Law and Liberty, Persuasion, and the Louisville Courier-Journal. Tyler’s academic work has recently been published in the journal Pietas.  Tyler received a Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Arts in Government from the University of Virginia. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Government and History from Morehead State University where he graduated with honors.

Nadya Williams is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023) and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity. She is currently writing a survey of Greek and Roman classics for Christians–Christians Reading Pagans (under contract at Zondervan Academic). She is Book Review Editor for Current, where she also edits The Arena blog. She is also a Contributing Editor with Providence and holds a PhD in Classics from Princeton University. You can find her on X @NadyaWilliams81.