Debra Erickson

Just war thinking is moral analysis of military action, not a framework for foreign policy. Acknowledging these limitations helps us to become better just war casuists, and it highlights the need for values-driven strategic thinking in the foreign policy sphere.

Hope is, fundamentally, the conviction that things can be different, that what is badly wrong with the world is not ultimately irreparable. Like the Christian calendar, which mirrors the rhythms of the year even as it points to something beyond, hope directs our vision to a better world just beyond the horizon.

Melissa Florer-Bixler is angry, and she wants her fellow Mennonites to get angry, too. At least, that is the professed premise of her book, “How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace.”

In her 2003 book Just War Against Terror, Jean Bethke Elshtain argued for a new paradigm for a just war: the fight against global terrorism, particularly terrorism perpetrated by followers of militant Islam. Twenty years after 9/11, this claim is due for revisiting.

January 6, 2021, would have been Elshtain’s eightieth birthday. I can only imagine how she would have responded to the events of the day. I do not think she would have been surprised, but nor would she have despaired. Neither should we.

Pure partisanship—or political sectarianism—consists of commitment to an uncontested view of reality and fidelity to one’s ideological compatriots over the whole of one’s polity. Christian realists should not be such partisans.

Talking about a pandemic like it is an armed conflict obscures the clear distinctions between military and medical ethics, leading to faulty judgments and potentially creating additional moral and material harm.

Not every plague is a judgment, but every plague is a revelation.

Here are contrasting views of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy by Jerry Johnson and Debra Erickson.

Myths are powerful things. Tales of female warriors exist in cultures around the world, often serving as unifying national symbols. Until the present day, however, women warriors have remained isolated figures. We are now in the midst of an unprecedented change in the role of women in our armed forces, a change some view as long overdue.