Christian ethicists should read less moral theology and political philosophy and more history.

The most important needs so many Americans have are attended to by communities, not bureaucracies. The only institution that can meet these needs on anything like the scale required is the institution that the Boomers by and large neglected: the neighborhood church.

Alarmingly, today there are militant Islamists who are using “Strategic jihad” to threaten our fundamental freedoms and rights.

From the Print Edition

In what follows I will first lay out some of the most important obstacles, the challenges they pose, their respective weaknesses, and some thoughts on opportunities they offer; then I will offer some thoughts on how best to bring Christianity into engagement with American foreign policy.

Some lament the fact that we live in such a violent world, but that’s precisely the point. Because we live in a violent world, governments must take steps to deter those who can be deterred—and neutralize those who cannot.

Reinhold Niebuhr exposed the assumptions of progressive Christianity and helped create the political theology of “Christian realism”, which sought a more biblical view of how the Christian citizen can live responsibly within a civilization in crisis.

Since my commissioning in 1988 as a United States Army Chaplain Candidate, the fundamental purpose of war has changed relatively little: war generally remains a contest of wills to achieve political ends between nation-states employing military force. However, war inherently seems different today, does it not? How so?

Crouch’s book is a masterful and sorely needed correction regarding the nature and possibilities of power but it stops short precisely at that place where 21st-century American Christians are most perplexed with power: politics.